For there is no man can Write fo warily, but that he may fometime give Opportunity of Cavilling, to thofe who feek it. John Wallis, A treatife of Algebra, 1685.

From rather modest beginnings the British Combinatorial Conference has grown into an established biennial international gathering. A successful format for the Conference has been established whereby several distinguished mathematicians are each invited to give a survey lecture at the Conference and to write a paper for the Conference Volume, which is published in time for the start of the meeting. The present volume contains eight of the nine invited papers for the Ninth Conference held at the University of Southampton, 11-15 July 1983.

Between them the papers cover a broad range of combinatorics. The all-pervading subject of graph theory appears in a number of the papers. It is the central feature of the one by J.C. BERMOND and his co-authors in which they survey those results concerning diameter and connectivity in graphs and hypergraphs of importance for interconnection networks, Graph theory is also used by J.M. HAMMERSLEY in his study of the Friendship Theorem and the Love Problem. His paper looks back to classical mythology with references to Narcissus, but in producing it he has made use of the latest technology in the form of the Oxford University Laser-comp typesetting facility. Perhaps the day is not far off when it will become routine for authors to produce their papers by such means. Other papers using graph theory are those of Schrijver and Shult mentioned below.