At the end of 1980, when I finished writing a book of the cell division cycle with David Lloyd and Robert Poole, I promised myself that I would never write another. During the past few months there have been many times when I wished that I had kept that promise. During this time I have been reassuring my family, colleagues and not least myself, that it was ‘almost finished’. Now that it finally is complete, I promise that I will never write another. Well, perhaps not for a few years yet.

In writing this text, I have been primarily aiming at a level where new researchers to the field can obtain an overview of many of the exciting new developments in neutrophil biochemistry and physiology. To achieve this, I have kept the number of references to original work to a fairly low number. In doing so, I do not wish to detract from the hundreds or, more correctly, thousands of original publications that have arisen over the past 10 or 20 years. Instead, I have tried to make this an ‘easy read’ and so have only quoted key, landmark references or review articles. I hope that most of the important publications and authors are mentioned, and apologise now if I have offended anyone by not directly quoting their articles. To have included all the interesting and relevant publications in this field would have resulted in a text of over twice this size.