On hearing of Jock’s untimely demise I was in my office at Liverpool University. I was in early, alone, and cried unashamedly. In the academic world in which we co-existed, for me, Jock was a true gentleman and gentle man. Our paths did not cross often. During the late 1980s and early 1990s I was one, amongst many others, who engaged Jock in passionate debate about the whys and wherefores of radical left realism. We kept in touch from time to time in the years that followed. In 2011 I was invited as one of the critics in an ‘author meets critics’ session held at the British Criminology Conference that focused on the last book in his trilogy, The Criminological Imagination. As always, Jock took that event with the good humour, style, and with the intellectual prowess that had become the hallmarks of his presence and his work. The pages that follow are interwoven with personal reflections of his influence on me as well as intellectual reflections on his work more generally and its relationship with, and impact on, the development of a critical victimology.

In some respects this paper is in part an historical excavation of the ebbs and flows of criminological/victimological debates from 1980 to the present day. I make no apologies for taking this approach. Laub remarked in his 2003 presidential address to the American Society of Criminology published in 2004:

The field of criminology lacks a sense of its own history…There is a “presentism” in our field that I find contrary to the spirit of a healthy, intellectually vibrant enterprise…“[N]ew” developments in our field are constantly offered in an environment characterized by a collective amnesia…[W]e can rectify this by taking our past more seriously so that we will be better able to create our future (Laub 2004, pp. 1–2).

Further Rafter observed in her 2009 Sutherland address to the ASC: “Where we need words, we have silence. Where we need traditions, we have forgetfulness. Where we need reflexivity, we have ignorance” (Rafter 2010, p. 341). In taking these two observations on board it is important to note that there are, of course, different ways in which criminology/victimology and history might connect with one another. Hopefully this paper will contribute to the kind of internal history considered important by Laub and Rafter in offering some reflections about the shape and form of the increasing interest in the victim of crime that took place within the academy and policy agendas in the U.K. from the early 1980s to date.

In order to develop this history, the paper falls into three parts. In the first part I consider the time period 1980–1997 as a period of emergent optimism for criminology in the U.K., an optimism that existed in the face of the rise of neo-liberalism and political conservatism. Here I consider the role and influence of the left realist project during that time. In the second, I consider the time period from 1997–2007. During this time, such optimism was tested and what might be thought of as ‘realist’ was challenged. As a tongue in cheek play on words, the third part of this paper reflects on 2007 to date as ‘realism realised?’ Here I reflect on the gains and losses in the drive for an accurate victimological enterprise over the last 30 years. I conclude with some general observations on the legacy of Jock’s work in this vein. I am situating this discussion throughout against the backcloth of victimology and my personal location within that.

Emergent Optimism 1980–1997

I began my academic career in January 1975, 2 years after The New Criminology was first published. I, like many others, still have an original copy of that book. As a sociologist, my exposure to debates on crime came from within the sociology of deviance rather than criminology. From that position it was evident that the import of this particular intervention was, without doubt, profound. During the late 1970s much of what I was engaged in was on the periphery of debates on crime and social control. The election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister heading a Conservative government in 1979, alongside the inner city disturbances of 1981, was to change all that.

It is important to remember that in the U.K. at that time, criminology as a discipline had quite a different shape and form to it than it has contemporarily. The main loci for criminologists were the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge and the Home Office. Indeed this concentration was to prove key in the focus of attention given to crime and for radical left realism as it was first termed. The story of the relationship and influence of these two concentrations of criminologists is interesting in itself but for the purposes of the concerns of this paper, the commission of a pilot criminal victimisation survey, subsequently published by Sparks et al. (1977), was a pivotal turning point in the bigger debate about the ‘dark’ figure of crime, the nature and extent of the crime problem, and what was to be done about it. Castelbajac (2014) offers some insight into the tensions that the commission of this pilot survey generated. However it is evident from that analysis, that without persistent hard work on the part of those criminologically oriented civil servants inside the Home Office, the first British Crime Survey, published in 1983 might never have happened at all. It was in the aftermath of the publication of the results of this first survey that debates in the U.K. about the nature and extent of crime became both interesting and impassioned.

The publication of the results of the first British Crime Survey in 1983 was given fairly wide coverage. Its key findings were conveyed in such a way as to downplay the problem of crime. Given the public consternation about the civil disturbances in 1981 and the complaints by ethnic minority groups in particular about being over-policed and under-policed all at the same time, it is not surprising that the findings of such a survey would be used in this way. However the message conveyed by these findings, that the public’s concern with crime was out of proportion with their actual risk from crime (see Hough and Mayhew 1983, 1985), was one of the catalysts for the emergence of radical left realism. The findings of this first survey were used in such a way to suggest that people’s expressed fears of crime were ‘irrational.’ This suggestion unlocked a door. Enter radical left realism. It is, in fact, a moot point at which juncture left realism came into being with a clear conceptual framework and an interlinked policy agenda, but Matthews and Young (1992) suggest that this happened after the first Islington and Merseyside crime surveys (Jones et al. 1986; Kinsey 1984; Kinsey et al. 1986). Outraged by Home Office claims that the public were irrational these local surveys were:

… not only considerably more focussed than national studies, but embrace a much greater part of the whole process of criminalisation—namely the pattern of victimization, the impact of crime, the actual police response to both victim and offender, the public’s requirements as to an ideal police response and the public’s notions of appropriate penalties for various offences (Jones et al. 1986, p. 5).

Out of a desire for an ‘accurate victimology’ (Young 1986, p. 24), as both an evidential, and importantly a political response to what was coming out of the Home Office, radical left realism with its associated ‘square of crime’ (Young 1992) was borne. This birth, like all births was fraught with emotion. It set up administrative criminology (a short hand for the work emanating from the Home Office), left idealist criminology, and left realist criminology as different camps with competing agendas. This was purposeful since part of the left realist concern was to offer a political agenda on law and order that the Labour Party could work with in order to make a claim for election. Its key evidential and political message was that crime, when situated in its local context and in relation to what people knew went on in their neighbourhood, was a problem for people. In expressing fears about crime, people were not being irrational. This message did not fall on deaf ears but more of that shortly. In calling for an ‘accurate victimology’ left realism, arguably unintentionally, did much for the emergent concerns with the victim of crime that were on-going during this same period of time.

Miers (1978) documented the emergence and development of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board established in England and Wales in 1964. In this publication he talks of the politicisation of the victim, a process that presages some of the debate that was to ensue. Interestingly, the establishment of that board was done without reference to evidence from victims at all but rather it was understood as the last brick in the post Second World War version of the welfare state (Mawby and Walklate 1994). However as that decade moved into the 1970s, the feminist movement on the one hand and Victim Support on the other, both emerged and both embraced different concerns with criminal victimisation. So, when Young called for an ‘accurate victimology,’ victimology as a parallel meeting place for academics, campaign groups, and practitioners, was already making its presence felt in the U.K. in different contexts and in different ways. Indeed it could be argued that the debates that ensued about who spoke most meaningfully for and/or about the victim (of crime) from within criminology did much to enhance that victimological presence.

It is important to note that the suggestion that people’s fear of crime was irrational when put against their risk from crime did not only cause ire amongst left realists. Feminists, as academics and campaigners, already knew that women’s fear of crime was not irrational when put in the context of their routine experience of sexual danger in all of its guises (see inter alia Warr 1985; Stanko 1985, 1990). In making claims for an accurate victimology, left realism not only had to address the emergent criticisms from colleagues within criminology it also faced the challenge posed by feminism and feminist informed knowledge. This challenge and the response to it, typified in the contributions by Young (1988) and Stanko (1988) put to the fore not only methodological problems embedded in the commitment to local surveys but also problems for the realist policy agenda (see Walklate 2007, p. 73). The nature of this debate notwithstanding, its very presence arguably gave added impetus to work conceptually informed by feminism especially in and around violence against women (see for example Mooney 1993).

Feminists were not the only ones unhappy with both the Home Office and left realism. In summarizing a range of critiques of the left realist agenda, Jefferson et al. (1992, p. 1) state that it was neither as radical nor as realist as it claimed and was “accepting [of] the terrain of the powerful,” as Sim et al. (1987, p. 59) stated. This was a bold assertion indeed and it was generated, for me personally, through my increasing engagement with victimology (see Walklate 1989, 1990) and the sources of data on which it relied. Prime amongst these at that time (and still is) was the criminal victimisation survey. Indeed, the ways in which this survey method was originally used, and how it came to be refined (see also Mayhew and Hough 1988) needs to be understood against the backcloth of those debates between the different criminological voices of the 1980s. These debates were especially pertinent in the development of critical victimology.

Critical victimology is a label for a perspective that has been differently interpreted by different people (Holstein and Miller 1990; Miers 1990; Fattah 1992; Mawby and Walklate 1994). This discussion will focus on that version of critical victimology adopted by Walklate (1990) and developed by Mawby and Walklate (1994). In its first iteration it arose from debates with left realism concerning whether or not the survey instrument was ‘democratic’ (Walklate 1989) and the question of what constituted the ‘real’ (Walklate 1990). Additionally influenced by the methodological questions raised by the work of Harding (1991), Bhaskarian realism and the theorising of Giddens (1984), this understanding of victimology puts to the fore the processes that create the victims we ‘see’ as well as the ones that we do not ‘see.’ The victim is understood as a human agent who can be active as well as passive and focuses attention on the underlying structural processes that lead to the manifestation and/or experience of victimisation. Thus the patterning of criminal victimisation, that both national and local surveys were becoming increasingly adept at revealing, could be embraced but within a framework that appreciated the role of vested interests in the state in (re)producing them. Chouliaris (2011, p. 38) reminds us that:

Critical victimology…engages in a twofold task: to cast light on the institutions and structural relations that favour specific images of victimisation at the expense of others (contextualization); and to draw attention to situations that, despite producing serious victimization, are not designated as such.

Within this framework who becomes a victim, and who might embrace a victim identity (Rock 2002), or indeed who might resist such an identity (Walklate 2011) is neither simple nor straightforward and cannot be read from the patterning of criminal victimisation in and of itself.

In my view it is unlikely that this kind of deeper conceptual development of victimology would have taken the shape and form that it did without the debates generated by Jock Young’s work during the 1980s and into the 1990s. Indeed, Jock himself was influential in the space I was afforded to develop this agenda work at a major conference on Realist Criminology held in Vancouver, Canada in 1990 and the following year at the British Criminology Conference, York, 1991.

Alongside the intellectual debates about realism in criminology, the local surveys generated under this umbrella also produced not only interesting data but also interesting local political consequences. In generating interesting data, the work of Hesse et al. (1992), originally commissioned as a local report in 1988, can be regarded as seminal in putting racial harassment on the agenda both in extending understandings of the shape and form of victimisation and how it might be measured. Moreover, Russell’s (1990) Rape in Marriage was published adding some more fuel to the fire of what could and could not be done with the survey method in and around victimisation, added to by the work of Painter (1991) and Mooney (1993). These kinds of developments did much to extend understandings of both the nature of victimisation and who could be a victim some of which is traceable to the presence of the left realism.

In terms of local politics, the links made with Islington Borough Council were but one route whereby concerns about crime, and victims of crime, were finding sympathetic ears amongst politicians looking for an agenda with which to combat Conservative political dominance. Then John Smith, the Leader of the Labour Opposition in the House of Commons, died suddenly. From this moment the political landscape began to change. Tony Blair, shadow home secretary when John Smith died, appeared to be a sympathetic ear to the left realist project. Indeed there are some traces of that project to be found within the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (see also Hopkins-Burke 2005), the flag ship legislation of the Labour Government elected in 1997. Though, reading between the lines of Young’s (1994) observations concerning points of agreement between right and left realism, the political empathy between left realism and the Labour Party, was probably on the wane by 1997. The demonisation of single mothers and the underclass by politicians and the media in particular, following the murder of a two-year old boy, James Bulger, on Merseyside (see Mooney 2003; Young 1999) was arguably an important turning point in this relationship. By 1997, essentializing the other was well established in political terms solidly critiqued by Young (1999). Of note in this essentializing process, was and is the invocation of the victim.

During the 1990s alongside the developments above, the role and use of the criminal victimisation survey as a source of data about the nature, extent and impact of crime, grew apace both nationally and internationally. Moreover, the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act in the U.K., in assigning the responsibility for devising local plans in the management of crime almost, by default, rendered local criminal victimisation surveys part of this planning process. Perhaps not quite the kind of local engagement envisioned by left realism but nonetheless one that local crime and disorder partnerships embraced. Consequently from the local level to the international level, never before had there been so much information available about criminal victimisation in which the debates generated by left realism had been an important moment both conceptually and empirically in adding to our knowledge of criminal victimisation (see Dekeseredy and Schwartz 2013). However the concern for an ‘accurate victimology’ was a search for more than just data: it was a search for data that made sense in explaining people’s experiences and understandings of crime. Whilst Hope (2007) has eloquently evidenced the shortcomings inherent in the criminal victimisation survey’s capacity to achieve this, it is also evident that by the end of the 1990s the contours of who could be considered as a legitimate victim (of crime) had changed considerably (Walklate 2013) largely as a result of the available of these kinds of data sets. So much so that Zedner (2002, p. 419) states:

Victims, once on the margins of criminological research, are now a central focus of academic research. Crime surveys, both national and local, and qualitative studies of the impact of crime, of victim needs and services have furnished a wealth of information which has permanently altered the criminological agenda…As a result the victim has moved from being the ‘forgotten actor’ to key player in the criminal justice process.

The accuracy of this statement is debatable.

1997–2007: Optimism Denied?

During this time period, The Exclusive Society (1999) and The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) were published. In one sense it is possible to read both of these books as a telling history, not of the demise of left realism per se but certainly of its disenchantment and critique of Labour Party politics and policies. It is interesting to reflect that whilst the victim in her ever-increasing diversity rose higher and higher on policy and political agendas (for example the Domestic Violence, Victims and Crime Act 2004, along with various directives to improve responses to ethnic minority groups, as well as a range of initiatives emanating from Europe and the United Nations), what that presence actually comprised in reality left much to be desired. (In the context of violence against women see for example the collection edited by Brown and Walklate 2011). Looking back on this decade from the vantage point of 2014 it is easier to see how and why this might have happened, what Fraser (2009) has referred to as the ‘cunning of history.’

At this juncture rather than talk of victims generically, I shall use the example of violence against women as a specific illustration of the wider processes I want to consider here. I am using this example deliberately insofar as the debates generated by left realism in the late 1980s were part of the process that facilitated a wider discussion of violence against women within criminology more generally rather than outwith the discipline. In addition, critical victimology, the lens through which I am reflecting on the work of Jock Young, took on board feminist informed concerns. For these two reasons, what follows is illuminating.

In 2007 Stanko, reflecting on her engagement with violence against women, observed that she experienced more continuity with the past than change in terms policy and practice. In addition, Mooney (2007) asked in respect to domestic violence how is it that this can be such a public anathema but at the same time a private commonplace. Each of them in their own way was expressing a sense of ‘optimism denied.’ The question is why? In the face of the evidence generated by criminal victimisation surveys, the recognition of gender violence by politicians and policy makers, the increasing centrality of these concerns to criminology/victimology, why had so little changed? Fraser’s (2009) analysis of the relationship between second wave feminism and neo-liberalism is as uncomfortable as it is telling. She asks us to consider the possibility that second wave feminism had inadvertently contributed to the legitimation of neo-liberalism. Put succinctly she suggests that neo-liberalism in its very essence can handle claims of difference and identity (claims to victimhood rooted in sex, sexuality, ethnicity) whilst at the same time struggling with claims rooted in class. Fraser (2009, p. 113) observes:

…this capitalism [neo-liberalism] would much prefer to confront claims for recognition over claims for redistribution, as it builds a new regime of accumulation on the corner stone of women’s wage labour and seeks to disembed markets from social regulation in order to operate all the more freely on a global scale.

So second wave feminism, and all the claims associated with this historical moment, has become an unhappy bedfellow of neo-liberalism. As a consequence, claims rooted in difference can be heard but they may not be listened to in the ways expected. Hence the changing contours of who can claim victim status by the twenty-first century commented on by Walklate (2012). Moreover during this same time period, as Young (2007) observed, ‘othering’ continues. The fall-out from 9/11 being key in this process of suspectification, (Walklate and Mythen 2014) while those once ‘the other’ (women and those subjected to hate crime) appear to be heard in the guise of ‘risk crazed governance’ (Carlen 2008; Walklate 2008). Thus it is perhaps easier to envisage how the victim has served both the interests of the state and the interests of criminology/victimology simultaneously, with the latter losing sight of the bigger picture alluded to by Fraser (2009) in the process.

During this time left realism changed shape and form (Dekeseredy and Schwartz 2013) and began to occupy a different global space (South America in particular): a location in which optimism might not be so denied. However, the critical victimological voice so influenced by earlier times, persisted on the margins of victimology whilst positivist victimology, dressed up as the criminal victimisation survey, secured its hold at the centre of data generating and informing policy. It is of value to say a little more about the centrality of this version of victimology and the relevance of that centrality for the discussion here.

Miers (1989) first coined the term ‘positivist victimology’ and defined it in terms of its focus (‘street’ crime) and its method: the criminal victimisation survey. As has been alluded to already, this method is not without its problems though most of them derive from an implicit commitment to positivism at the level of methodology. This sets limits on the value of the data that the survey method produces. However it is also important to note that this way of generating data has its value. It reveals a consistent pattern to us that provided we are primarily interested in ‘conventional’ crime, the experience of criminal victimisation is not evenly distributed across all population groups. Indeed quite the reverse is the case. Depending upon what kind of crime is being considered an individual’s chance of criminal victimisation can be maximised or minimised by factors such as age, ethnicity, sex and social class. However generally it is the poorest members of society who carry most of the burden of crime, especially in terms of impact, and more often than not have the least resources to manage it. Just to reiterate though this leaves much criminal victimisation out of the picture especially that which goes on behind closed doors (like for example child abuse or elder abuse) and that which goes on behind our backs (like for example, crimes of the state or corporate crime). Similarly, the patterning of criminal victimisation generated by the International Criminal Victimisation Survey is not without value, provided that the same caveats are accepted. However those limits also place limits on the explanatory potential of such data (Hope 2007). It is at this juncture that a fundamental epistemological problem emerges. What do these data sources smooth out and what do they give prominence to in how they ask questions, what they ask questions about, who they ask questions of, and what they suggest to policy makers on the basis of asking those questions? These questions encourage us to think about the ‘black box’ of the criminal victimisation survey. (Walklate 2014). Perhaps put more simply, where is the space for what might be considered to be the ‘irrational life’ of the individual? Where are the voices of ordinary, everyday life? To use the example of violence again, Mooney (2007) has suggested, the values whereby men’s violence to women is sustained in the face of public imperatives otherwise “exist throughout the width and breadth of popular culture” (Mooney 2007, p. 169). Like, for example, the vicarious pleasure gained by some young males in witnessing violence on a ‘good night out’ (Winlow and Hall 2006). Thus violence becomes ‘folded into everyday life’ (Das 2007) as when a woman living with violence, judges that the risk of poverty and homelessness are worse than the violence she knows she will be subjected to (see also Genn 1988; Kirkwood 1993). Criminal victimisation surveys fade out these voices: those who ‘know otherwise,’ (Jordan 2011). The spectre of ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills 1959; Young 2011) is alive and well in victimology too.

To summarize, in this decade victimhood was normalised and marginalized all at the same time. So far from crime being used as a unified and a unifying concept, (a criticism levelled at radical left realism in the 1980s), victimhood has replaced it. Thus Furedi (1997/2002) and Cole (2007) could talk of a culture of victimhood, whilst both Stanko (2007) and Mooney (2007) could also comment on how little had changed. Yet, as Young (2007) observed from the dizzy heights of a late modern society, some key features underpinning all of this were persistent in their presence. Enter 2008.

2007 to Date: Realism Realised?

If September 11th 2001 constituted a significant moment in which some things would never be the same, the financial crisis of 2008 was another. Or at least should have been for those concerned about what counts as crime, who is the victim of crime, and who is the criminal. The extent to which this actually transpired to be the case is open to debate. However what both events did do is set criminology and victimology in a much wider global agenda than ever envisaged by either left realism or critical victimology. The ‘elephant in the room’ in the “othering of othering” commented on by Young (2007, p. 163) of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan tellingly revealed the reality of the contemporary global world, as did the financial crisis of 2008. The potential impetus these events afforded for both critical criminological and critical victimological voices was significant.

In The Vertigo of Late Modernity (1999) Young is in part encouraging us to think about the continuities between the past and present. In so doing, it is no coincidence that old fashioned ‘police property’ (Lee 1981) that invariably includes the young, the unemployed, and those from ethnic minority groups are those who are still ‘victims’ in the broadest sense of the term. These are also the people who have suffered as work has become deregulated and opportunities for work more insecure. In the context of austerity measures, they are those most likely to be both the subject and the object of such measures, as well as the least materially able to manage the consequences. There is nothing particularly new about this (see, for example, Fox-Piven and Ohlin 1971). As the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider, not just in relation to wealth but also in relation to all forms of ‘well-being,’ including life expectancy, the stark consequences of neo-liberal capitalism take their toll on people from the local to the global. Consequently, there is a symmetrical relationship between those least likely to be pre-occupied with the liquid anxieties of the age—since their pre-occupations have always been with work, food and shelter—and those most likely to be the targets of institutional pre-occupations, since they constitute the other, the wasted, those to be feared (See also Hallsworth and Lea 2011). However, the processes underpinning this symmetrical and symbiotic relationship are, as Wacquant (2009) suggests, doubly political. They are a product of institutional actors and rest on a presumption that ‘we have a life in common.’ Importantly, if we do have a life in common, that life is most pronounced in the realm of the economic. This is, in essence, the realism realised.

The Criminological Imagination (Young 2011) completed the third part of his trilogy. In this third and final book he presents a wide-ranging critique of the kind of criminological work, and its science, that has underpinned the political and policy processes that were a constituent part of the changes documented in the first two books, some of which are reflected in the discussion here. In this book Young invites us to re-consider the seminal work of Mills in order to make sense of the criminological involvement in the ‘science of othering’ discussed in The Exclusive Society and The Vertigo of Late Modernity. He focuses notably on Mills’ observations on the dangers of abstracted empiricism and is centrally pre-occupied with ‘bogus of positivism.’ Hence the parallels with victimology commented on above. Much of this critique is directed towards the “most influential criminology generated by the most atypical society” (Young 2011, p. 80). Young argues that the influence of this ‘fetishism with numbers’ takes its toll on not only what is considered to be acceptable criminological work but also rests on unsound assumptions about social reality.

The toll taken by the ‘bogus of positivism’ is equally pertinent to victimology (Walklate 2008, 2014). (Indeed my development of this critique owes much to the discussion generated by the ‘author meets critics’ session mentioned at the beginning of this paper). Implied in the critique developed by Young and amongst the ironies for a critical criminology that he outlines, are the problems of Northern theorising (Connell 2007) and its associated presumptions of Occidentalism (see Cain 2000), coupled to the problems of geography and voice as commented on by Aas (2012). If we render these observations more concrete and place ourselves within a victim framework we can ask: for whom was/is 9/11 a problem and who benefited most/least from the 2008 economic crisis? Thus it is possible to insert two further ironies into Young’s list: knowledge is universal—knowledge is context bound, the state is absent—the state is central (Walklate 2012 qua Young 2011, p. 215). Arguably tapping into and reaching back to aspects of the impassioned debates of the 1980s but now refracted through greater sensitivity to the inequalities of the current global world, rather than a local one, and what counts as knowledge within it. This is also realism realised.

Conclusion

Young (2011, p. 275) states, “those who would seek to marginalize critical criminology fail to comprehend its purchase on the grain of social reality.” Here I would add, even when we do not particularly like what that social reality is saying to us. Whilst we need to continue to speak the unspoken and give voice to the unpalatable, and ultimately recognise the power of the ‘et ceteris paribus’ clause embedded within hegemonic epistemologies (de Sousa Santos 2007), it is also important to recognise that those same hegemonic epistemologies have benefited some groups in some contexts. The international recognition of violence against women might be one such example. This might be unpalatable but is nevertheless part of social reality. However, if criminology/victimology after Young is to be a moral enterprise then it is as important as ever to challenge the bogus positivism and make explicit the ironies embedded in much of contemporary criminology’s and victimology’s world view. This presence of this bogus is as evident in victimology as criminology. In each the search for an imagination (qua Young 2011) is still on.

This is one take of an internal history of the development and influence of the ideas of one of the major figures of criminology of recent times. Daly (2011, p. 11) in making some observations about contemporary criminology, states:

Originality and quality are elusive terms, but they collect around the notion of a researcher’s ‘intellectual authenticity,’ which is associated with taking chances, challenging the status quo, but not conforming to fashionable trends…Clarity and liveliness in writing and speaking is essential.

Jock had all of these and much more besides. These pages only provide a flavour of his legacy.