Joan Robinson, who died in 1983 after a prolonged illness, was one of the truly great and controversial economists of (what George Shackle called) the age of high economic theory. She was an astute theoretician in the tradition of the Cambridge school of political economy. She was gifted with remarkable intuitive and analytical powers and an exceptionally logical mind. She was fired with the enthusiasm of the Schumpeterian 'creatively destructive' innovator and pursued a relentless quest to get the logical argument right. She believed that the success of economics depends more on insight than precision and that its affinity must be with history as much as with mathematics. Like Keynes, she thrived on controversy.