I have an awful lot to thank universities for. To begin with, I have had considerable freedom in choosing what to do, with the result that I have been able to think about all kinds of issues and ideas in a way that just isn’t open to most people. Then, universities have given me some extraordinary experiences. Just two will suffice. One was a research visit to Vietnam in the early 1980s. The Russians were still there in force and the Air France plane from Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City that I departed on was full of the distraught children of Vietnamese mothers and GI fathers being carried to new homes in the US. The children let out an extraordinary and extraordinarily affecting intake of breath followed by a deep sigh of regret as the plane took off – this was both their first experience of flying and the first jab of grief they experienced on leaving their mothers. Another was a hot and sweaty visit to the Square Kilometre Array in deepest outback Australia, which not only transmitted a deep and brooding sense of the life of the planet but also a keener appreciation of humanity’s place in the universe. Universities have enabled me to live an interesting and expansive life too. Because of them, I have been able to teach and do research in locations as varied as Cambridge, Leeds, Lampeter, Bristol, Oxford and Warwick, as well as in a number of overseas locations like ANU. In each of them I have been pushed to think and do new things. Universities have given me the particular privilege of teaching some fearsomely bright students who forced me to bump up against my own prejudices and, most importantly of all, clarify what I meant. Universities have enabled me to work with colleagues who were a genuine inspiration. Some of them seemed to be working in a different dimension from me, one where thought moved at light speed and ideas were sprinkled around like confetti. Universities mean that I have been able to encounter people who I have been pleased just to have sat across from or even been in the same room as.