‘You're writing a textbook on the history of linguistics? That's impossible: only a team can do it now.’ That was the reaction of a French colleague when, back in 1990, I told her I was writing this book. On a practical level she was right. As the German scholar Peter Schmitter pointed out a year later, the history of linguistics was then growing faster than any other subdiscipline of linguistics. Even in the late 1980s, over five hundred publications were appearing annually in the history of linguistics, more than twice as many as in syntax, semantics or phonetics, its nearest competitors. No one person can claim to have read all the literature, or even a large percentage of it, much less all the primary literature – all the writings which touch upon language, whether by philosophers, theologians, grammarians, psychologists, anatomists, educationalists or indeed linguists – from every era and every corner of Europe. We are necessarily specialists. All the same, however, most historians of linguistics have to teach. When we pluck up the courage to do so, we overcome our private panic at the torrent of secondary literature and the daunting jungle of sources, in order to guide our students to the overviews from which they can get some sense of the overall shape of the subject. Naturally we linger in our own favourite spots, hurrying past those of our colleagues with scarcely a glance. What we lose by being selective, though, we gain by becoming alive to the grand themes and recurring patterns of the 2,500 years of European intellectual history.