For nearly 30 years, generations of students of crop protection have used a slim volume, written by one of us (HvE), and first published in the Studies in Biology Series entitled Pest Control and its Ecology (1974) and later revised with the title simplified to Pest Control (1989).

When the time came for a 3rd edition, the publisher (in the form of Ward Cooper of Cambridge University Press) asked that the book be enlarged and expanded to include areas of applied entomology not included previously, particularly the control of insects of medical and veterinary importance.

Fortunately we had been undergraduates together in the Department of Zoology and Applied Entomology at Imperial College, graduating in 1955 and, although agricultural and medical entomology led our respective careers in different directions immediately thereafter, we have remained in contact and firm friends ever since. The co-authorship of the new enlarged edition was therefore never in doubt!

Like Pest Control (1989), this book is also limited to the control of arthropods; we felt that amplifying the title would make the latter cumbersome if more descriptive.

We think the result is a book unique in the width of its coverage of the control of problem insects. We have not only covered insects of agricultural, stored product, medical and veterinary importance, but we have included the full range of control methods, including some which will be unfamiliar to most readers.