Now, cutting forward very rapidly – I’ll come back again to what I’ve been saying – but cutting forward, I’ll just say that after eight or nine years of this, we became... because the group was so productive, we became recognised as experts in this area, both in this country and more widely throughout the world, and Terry Gibb and I decided that at the end of the decade, it would be a good time to write a book on it. And we wrote a book which was very well received, Mössbauer Spectroscopy, which for several decades was the ‘bible’ of Mössbauer spectroscopers.

We gave the physical basis of the effect. It was a book written for chemists, by chemists, and it wasn’t a physics book – as there was a physics book available – but our concentration was: explain in chemically intelligible terms what the effect was, what it could do, and then we went through all the known compounds, and all the known papers, of which there were many hundred by that time, into quite a large book.