It is twenty years since William Empson, just a year after his retirement from Sheffield University, truly turned his mind to collecting his essays and articles. Uncharacteristically invoking the gospel of St John (9, 4) – or maybe he was thinking more immediately of John Donne's Satire III, line 84 – he wrote to his old friend and publisher Ian Parsons in 1972: ‘I well know that the night cometh when no man can work, and that I had much better be getting my affairs in order. In fact I meant to do it when I retired, but the inflation is so alarming that it seems better to keep in employment while I may. Besides, I am always finding mistakes in my old articles while having to read some book again for a lecture.’

As that letter suggests, whenever he tried to gather up his writings he invariably felt it necessary to review the argument and ammunition he had originally marshalled for any particular piece. In addition, he found it imperative, not merely to substantiate points of old controversy, but to drive forward into new areas; he was not one to rest on his offprints. He willingly granted in the introductory remarks to his Clark Lectures, given at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1974: ‘I am usually saying things that other people disagree with, and I need to present a much stronger case in print than I do in a lecture.