This collection of essays, by friends, colleagues and former students, is presented to Derek Beales to mark and to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. It is at least doubly appropriate that it should be called History and Biography. For not only was this the title of his inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, which is reprinted here: it also describes his range and defines his accomplishments as a scholar. Few historians today trouble themselves with large-scale, full-dress biographies. Even fewer biographers write anything that is recognisable as serious history. Derek Beales, by contrast, may justly claim to be both a distinguished historian and a gifted biographer. He has written national history, international history, political history, constitutional history, ecclesiastical history and cultural history. For four years, he taught a Special Subject on Gladstone's First Ministry in Part Two of the Cambridge Historical Tripos. And he is still engaged on his major work: a magisterial biography of the Emperor Joseph II. As all his writing makes plain, Derek Beales is fascinated by the interplay between men and events, individuals and circumstance. He is sceptical of impersonal and structural history, and he has never favoured debunking or mocking biography. And he is as much an historiographer as he is an historian. Not for nothing was the alternative title for his inaugural lecture ‘Historians as Great Men, and Great Men as Historians’.

As Derek Beales would be the first to remind us, there are formative influences on historians no less than on statesmen or monarchs.