The fourteenth British Combinatorial Conference is to be held here in July 1993 and, as is usual, the British Combinatorial Committee has invited nine distinguished combinatorial mathematicians to give survey talks on the latest developments in their own fields. This volume contains the papers which they have agreed to submit in advance of their talks.

The quality of these contributions and the interest shown are encouraging signs that the fourteenth conference will be as successful as its predecessors.

The sixtieth birthday of Crispin Nash-Williams falls in 1993, and to mark his tremendous contribution to the growth of combinatorics both in Britain and the world, one day of the conference is to be ‘Nash-Williams day’. The talks by András Frank and Anthony Hilton on that day will be in his honour, as will be many of the contributed talks, and to him this volume is dedicated.

A special edition of Discrete Mathematics, edited by Douglas Woodall, will contain papers contributed to the conference.

I wish to thank the contributors and the referrees for their co-operation in meeting quite tight deadlines, Roger Astley of Cambridge University Press, and the London Mathematical Society and the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications for their financial support.