Why did I choose Alan Earnshaw? Well I obviously wanted someone who was well versed in inorganic chemistry. Alan was a colleague of mine, he had a very easy-going style, both of writing and of existing, and he had already written, with Jack Lewis [sic], a small but very well known monograph on magnetochemistry, so I knew he knew the mechanics of publishing.

And so I asked him, I said, ‘Would you like to read this to see how it’s going?’ And he read through what I’d done. He said, ‘Gee this is great, why doesn’t anyone else write like this?’ He was very enthusiastic and I said, ‘Well if you like it Alan, would you help me finish it?’ And so he’d taken the bait and he discussed it with his wife, because he realised that that was going to be a commitment, which has an impact on families as well, so but he agreed to do. So we finished off the book together in that way.

So that was a rough story of how the book was generated and why it has the shape that it does have.