Many people like to say the last words in an academic debate, and I am no exception. I have tried to do this on a few occasions, only to discover that when I came to say my piece, everyone had left the room. The analysis of variance is a case in point, and my comments on Tukey’s contributions to anova explain the problem. If – as I believe to be true – people don’t care much these days what Tukey thought about anova, they are going to care even less what I think. This is not said with any sense of bitterness. Indeed I regard myself as something of a student of fads, fashions and trends in statistics, so why should I expect otherwise? Nevertheless, I’m very happy to see these articles reprinted, as their easier availability may kindle the interest of someone, somewhere, sometime in what I still believe to be an important part of (the history of) our subject.

My main stimulus for work in this area came from the papers of six people: R.A. Fisher, Frank Yates, and John A. Nelder from the U.K, indeed all from Rothamsted, Alan T. James and Graham Wilkinson from Adelaide, Australia, and John W. Tukey from the U.S.A. Unpublished lecture notes by James were extremely helpful in getting me going. The anova program within GENSTAT, initially created by Wilkinson based on research by James, Wilkinson, James & Wilkinson and Nelder, was enormously influential. It was (and remains) truly brilliant in conception and execution, and I wanted to understand it. For a long time I was interested in – one might say obsessed with – the symmetries underlying much of anova, and that is reflected in some of the papers reprinted (thank you Rosemary Bailey)! But also I wanted to understand how users of anova saw things, including gory details such as the combination of information, the analysis of covariance and dealing with missing values, all topics with wonderful histories. I made one attempt to put it all together for general consumption, but that got rejected, and so I moved on to other things. As explained above, it is not clear how many people now care. I hope you enjoy the papers. There are several more if you do.