Preface

Summary

We are grateful to the members of the Radical Statistics Group for their support and encouragement from the start, and to the Troika for covering travel costs for preliminary brain-storming meetings and for subsequent editorial meetings. John Bibby and Jan Bohnke played key roles in originating the project. We are thankful to those who reviewed chapters. Some reviewers are among the book's contributors; others include Simon Briscoe, Madeline Drake, Dave Drew, Craig Duncan, John Grahl, Richard Hall, Donald Houston, Anne Humbert, Dougal Hutchison, Paul Jackson, David Jarrett, Mark Johnson, Orthodoxia Kyriacou, Tony O’Sullivan, Jon Macnicol, Adrian Sinfield, Grahame Thompson, Stephan Tietz, Liz Twigg, David Webster. We have also benefitted from the comments of the publisher's reviewers both at the proposal stage and after the initial submission of the manuscript.

All these suggestions and observations helped us to reinforce our attempts to produce a book which is readable and accessible to a broad range of people, including undergraduate students and interested members of the public. We also thank our academic, technical and administrative colleagues at our several institutions (Middlesex University, De Montfort University and Portsmouth University) for help on various occasions.

We are especially grateful to those who have given permission to use their cartoons and illustrations to cheer up the book's material: to Melanie Schoelhammer for the illustration preceding the introduction to the book; to Russell Ecob (on behalf of Tinikke Treffers) for those on the title pages of Parts I and V; to Tim Hunkin, for those on the title pages of Parts II, III and IV; to Claire Calman (on behalf of Mel Calman) for the cartoon for the Part VI title page; and to xkcd.com for the cartoon on the Epilogue title page.

We are indebted to the team at Policy Press, especially Shannon Kneis, Victoria Pittman, Kathryn King, Phylicia Ulibarri-Eglite and Bahar Celik Muller, for valuable guidance and support. Above all, we thank the authors who have contributed chapters and responded to several deadlines and multiple requests for clarification and further details – and Danny Dorling for writing the Foreword.

For further insight into the aims and activities of the Radical Statistics Group, please see Chapter 23 or www.radstats.org.uk.