I must confess to being a late convert to post-Keynesian economics. It never featured in any of my undergraduate or postgraduate studies. My earliest recollection of coming across any of its proponents was at a Royal Economic Society conference at which one of the keynote addresses was given by Paul Davidson. That evening, I remember confessing to an established professor I was with to not knowing anything about post-Keynesians, and his reassuring me that it was not something I needed to worry about. There matters rested until staffing changes at Durham meant a reallocation of authors and topics in an introductory course of history of economic thought, so that John Maynard Keynes came into my part of the syllabus. I thought I knew what Keynes had said, but, obviously, set about reading up on the topic again. It was then that I realized that what I thought he had said was mostly inaccurate, if not wrong altogether. I also realized how much I had missed out and how valuable that was. The rediscovery of Keynes himself was one of the first steps. It was reading up on Keynes that led me to the post-Keynesians, in particular Davidson on rational expectations, which was very much a chance find, and John King on micro-foundations. From then on it has been my personal journey of discovering a literature that I truly wish had featured earlier in my economic education. The more I read, the more I found that interested me. Much as John Hicks wrote to Davidson in private correspondence (about ergodicity), sometimes one needs a specific word for one's thoughts to find shape. It was the same for me: many doubts, which I had somehow suppressed on various elements of mainstream economic theory, I found had already been addressed by post-Keynesians, often, but not always, following a lead from Keynes himself.

The next stage in my post-Keynesian journey came when the newly instituted third-year undergraduate optional module dedicated to this heterodox school came to be vacant without ever having run. I was called to step in. In this, as in many other things, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my then colleague Dr Mark Hayes, who had proposed the module and done the preliminary work for bringing it into existence, but had found himself unable to deliver it in the end.