This has been a difficult book to write and an even more difficult one to finish. It is with some embarrassment that I recall it was as long ago as 1973 that I published an article entitled ‘The British in Catherine's Russia: a preliminary survey’ with every expectation of finishing a book within two years, rather than two decades. The survey was basically sound, although the use of the word ‘preliminary’ was well-advised. What I was then surveying was indeed the tip of an iceberg and with every year that passed, the imposing size of that iceberg slowly revealed itself. More and more fascinating individuals were discovered, more and more archives, family and public, were found, more and more areas of British activity were recognised. I have frequently sought refuge from the colossus by writing other books, other articles, some, but not all, connected with Anglo-Russian relations, and including a book whose title, ‘By the Banks of the Thames’, echoes that of the present volume but which was considerably easier to write, not least because the materials were more circumscribed, the number of individuals involved infinitely smaller.

My fascination with the general theme of Anglo-Russian relations in the eighteenth century dates back to my postgraduate study of the career of Nikolai Karamzin, the Russian man-of-letters who visited, and wrote about, England just after the French Revolution; but if I were to single out two works which influenced the direction and range of my research specifically into the activities of the British in eighteenth-century Russia at an earlier stage, I would name Matthew Anderson's Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553–1815 (London, 1958) and James Cracraft's article, ‘James Brogden in Russia, 1787–1788’ (1969).