It is not easy to write an appreciation of a moving target, which perhaps best describes Michael Duffy at his retirement in the autumn of 2009. He has not found it easy to leave a busy teaching job after forty years. At the time of writing, he still has five Ph.D. students working on their theses, to add to the remarkable total of twenty who have already been through his hands over twenty-seven years. The growing list of books which his students have generated now stands at nine, and more than a dozen substantial articles. It is typical of Michael that he takes more pleasure in their success than from his own very long list of publications, which can be seen after this preface. The list of works by Michael Duffy and his students' publications will have many additions in the coming years.

It all started at Oxford, where Michael was taught by Piers Mackesy and then supervised by P. G. M. Dickson, and his early research for his D.Phil. was on British diplomacy during the French Revolutionary War. He was appointed to the post of Assistant Lecturer at the University of Exeter in October 1969. He first wrote a study of eighteenth-century satirical prints, and through them he gained a thorough view of the eighteenth-century political world. He went on to edit a series on the subject, selecting six other young scholars, including John Brewer and Paul Langford, every one of whom has gone on to a distinguished career, an early indication of Michael's ability to make a shrewd assessment of his colleagues.