If I may freely paraphrase Lady Bracknell (in The Importance of Being Earnest), to deliver an inaugural lecture one year after arrival in Cambridge seems unfortunate; to deliver it after being in post for two years looks like carelessness. Yet, as those from the Institute of Criminology will know, there is a particular reason for this timing. This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University's postgraduate course in criminology, and I was myself a student on that first course, back in 1961. For me, therefore, there is a special personal satisfaction that this lecture is immediately to be followed by our formal celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the course.