Over its two editions, The New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry has come to be regarded as one of the most popular and trusted standard psychiatry texts among psychiatrists and trainees. Much gratitude is due to the distinguished editors for bringing us the book, the many first-class authors for contributing their chapters and Oxford University Press for their excellent production. The book will, in my view, continue to occupy a dominant place in the international medical literature and, at least for the foreseeable future, could well turn out to be the most widely used and influential reference work of its kind in psychiatry.