Tribute to Jim Emsley

I first met Jim almost 50 years ago. He very kindly invited me to speak in his session at the 1978 RSC international NMR meeting in York, and shortly afterwards he was my external DPhil examiner. Over the years we met occasionally at conferences, but it was only in 2011, when I joined the editorial board of Progress in NMR Spectroscopy, that I got to know him better. Jim was the ideal editor, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the field and its practitioners, a sharp set of critical faculties, and a bone-dry, puckish sense of humour. For many years he and Jim Feeney ran the journal between them, commissioning and copy-editing everything themselves. The new board had twice the number of members but still struggled to match the Jims’ productivity. Jim remained an active and incisive contributor to editorial discussions long after his formal retirement, attending board meetings in person until Covid forced their suspension. Over almost 70 years he made a unique contribution to NMR, both through his own work on liquid crystals and through his and Jim Feeney’s generous championing of the best research across the whole field of magnetic resonance.