As an SHO, I bought the first edition of the Manual in 1982. It was a survival guide which provided safe certainties in the small hours of the night. It was small, light, and compact. There was no competition: the Roberton Manual was the book to have!

Nearly 20 years on, where has the 4th edition taken us? Bigger, certainly: a behemoth of a “small” manual with 550 pages. Not much taller or wider than its predecessors, but much thicker, the rather thin and closely typeset pages distinctly reminiscent of a Bible. Thirty four chapters and eight appendices. There’s an awful lot of information in here.

Road testing a book like this is quite a challenge. Clearly one should not ask …