The origin of this volume can be traced to a letter from Dr. P. V. Landshoff (PVL), inviting me to write on liquid metals for his series. By then, my earlier book on the subject, published in 1968, described correctly by Professor N. E. Cusack in his generous review as ‘Bare bones of liquid metals’, was almost 20 years old. Of course, Dr. T. E. Faber's 1972 book was much more extensive, and I immediately recognized that in one important area of the subject: namely, weak scattering theory of electrical transport in liquid metals and alloys (Ziman and Faber-Ziman theory, respectively; see also below), I could not possibly compete with the quality of that.

However, after a long inner debate, I accepted the iniviation and sent PVL a proposed outline which already made clear that it would be a large volume. Back came a reply from PVL and an adviser: could I extend it somewhat?! Perhaps this may have been partly motivated by my long-standing interests in matter under extreme conditions of temperature and pressure, but, nevertheless, these additional proposals led me into areas in which I had not contributed myself for more than a decade. In the end, Chapter 16 became the main response to this challenge, and this could not have been written without the help of the 1985 review by Dr. M. Ross of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. While mentioning that, I must also acknowledge the 1987 survey by Dr. R. N. Singh, which was used so extensively in Chapter 13. Dr. Singh worked closely with the late Professor A. B. Bhatia, with whom I was also fortunate enough to collaborate over a decade or so.