Tom McArthur has given all of us an immense body of knowledge about the English languages. It lives in our minds and becomes visible in our writing and our teaching, through which we share it with our readers and our students. He has had an enormous influence in our understanding and conceptualisation of English in its different forms around the globe. His scholarship has been monumental, as brilliantly described by Kingsley Bolton, David Graddol and Rajend Mesthrie in this issue of English Today.

Zooming in on the personal level, one anecdotal memory that I'd like to share is how Tom played a key role at the beginning of my academic career, when he helped me publish my first real academic article, about 20 years ago. I was teaching in Thailand at the time and I had written the draft of a paper where I looked at the language used by Tony Blair and George Bush Jr. I hesitantly decided to contact Tom to ask if English Today might be interested and I remember, as if it was yesterday, that when he wrote back saying ‘yes’ and gave me advice on how to improve my paper, it was for me a euphoric life-changing moment when I understood that academia was the place I wanted to be in. In her remembrance, his daughter Roshan says that he edited journal articles ‘with kindness’, and I was fortunate to experience precisely that kindness.