This is a collection of ‘linguistic autobiographies' by 23 British linguists who played a major role in the development of the subject in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century.

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• Includes contributions from 23 major British linguists.
  
• Provides an overview of the rapid growth of linguistics in the last 50 years.
  
• Reflects on the achievements of British linguistics since the Second World War.

Keith Brown is a member of the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of the Blackwell Publishing journal, Transactions of the Philological Society.

Vivien Law was lately Reader in the History of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She was the author or editor of numerous publications, including Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (1997).