Introduction: A life exploring blind corners: Tony Allan’s legacy 1. ‘Tony here!’ Reflections on Professor Tony Allan 2. Scalable Water Balances from Earth Observations (SWEO): results from 50 years of remote sensing in hydrology 3. Professor Tony Allan and Libya 4. Of intellectual friendship in fin-de-siecle London 5. Recollections of a peacemaker 6. Sanctioned discourse and the power of hegemonic imaginings 7. Water wars, conflict and cooperation ? how the virtual water concept helped change the discourse 8. How virtual water saved the Middle East from water wars 9. From zero-sum to variable-sum on the Nile 10. Egypt’s water balancing act 11. Contested baselines and transboundary water resources management, with illustrations from the Nile 12. Water and complex problemsheds in Karamoja, Uganda 13. Ozymandias in the desert: irrigation in Saudi Arabia 14. Locating the channel and other tales from the river bank: constants and change in river boundary delimitation 15. Power plus: Tony Allan’s contributions to understanding transboundary water arrangements 16. I remember Tony 17. The role of the private sector in sustainable development 18. The private sector and water services: a reflection 19. Water governance and system coordination across diverse risk-management cultures 20. Chronic crisis: 30 years on from the Dublin Principles and still no market to value water 21. When the virtual water runs out: local and global responses to addressing unsustainable groundwater consumption 22. The problem with water footprints outside of irrigated drylands 23. Virtual water, international relations and the new geopolitics of food 24. The role of virtual-water decoupling in achieving food?water security: lessons from Egypt, 1962?2013 25. Unexpected bright spots: how the pandemic, climate change and biodiversity loss are shaping the evolution of the nexus 26. Tony Allan: a magic toolbox of theoretical frameworks, a never-ending story 27. Accountants will save the world! 28. Irrigated agriculture: more than ‘big water’ and ‘accountants will [not] save the world’ 29. Farmers will save the world! 30. Crossed wires: public regulation and private action for water stewardship and sustainable farming 31. How decisions are made by politicians through the advocacy of peer reviewed research: the lens of advocacy coalition theory 32. The cost of food. Consequences of not valuing soil and water and the people who manage them