These essays, written over the last five years, reflect the pleasures (and I hope also in some measure the benefits) of thinking about the history of political theory in Cambridge in the intellectual atmosphere established over the last three decades, especially by Quentin Skinner, Richard Tuck and Istvan Hont, and steadily enhanced more recently by very many others. They also reflect the continuing stimulus of a remarkable range of colleagues and students who come to, or pass through, Cambridge from all over the world. It is a privilege to work in a setting of such beauty as that of King's College, and to work amongst such a rich and constantly changing array of friends and intellectual companions: a privilege which entails too many intellectual and personal debts for me even to begin to try to register them here. I should, however, like especially on this occasion to acknowledge what I continue to owe to my friends in Japan (above all to Professor Takamaro Hanzawa and Professor Takashi Kato and to their remarkable teacher Professor Kan'ichi Fukuda), to my King's colleague Istvan Hont, to my students over the last decade (NickTaylor most of all), and to Silvana Dean and Helen Gibson who do so much to make the Department of Social and Political Sciences an endurable framework in which to work as a university teacher, even a decade and a half after the coming of Margaret Thatcher.