Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the following friends and colleagues who reviewed and commented on earlier iterations of some of the chapters of my book: Dr. Parag Wate, Prof. Steve Fotios and Sam Brown (University of Sheffield), Dr. Yong Mao (University of Nottingham), Prof. Christian Inard (University of La Rochelle). Their valued feedback helped me to root out nasty gremlins and to improve the flow of the book.

Any remaining errors or misconceptions are entirely of my own doing.

I am also very grateful to Helen Moore and Maria Lawson (Maria is now happily retired), both of the University of Sheffield Library. They have been really helpful and supportive in the use of the Pressbooks authoring platform. I’m also very grateful to the Library for awarding me a small grant from their open scholarship support fund.

I would like to extend my thanks to Samuel Lodder-Knowles and to Dennis Karolev for their incredibly valuable support in proofreading, preparing graphical content and checking the need for and obtaining copyright permissions. Amazing work guys!

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I would like to thank my students, past, presented and future, for their constant source of motivation and inspiration. This book is for you!