George Lennox Sharman Shackle was born in Cambridge on 14 July 1903, the son of Robert Walker Shackle, a mathematician, and was educated at the Perse School. Being unable to take up a place at St Catharine's College in 1920, he took up a post as a bank clerk at the age of 17, followed by 10 years as a schoolmaster, during which he took an external BA with London University, gaining his degree in 1931. In 1934 he won a Leverhulme Research Scholarship to the London School of Economics, which he took up in January 1935. His doctoral dissertation (1937) became his first published book: Expectations, Investment and Income (1938). In March 1937 he joined the Oxford University Institute of Statistics, as research assistant to Henry Phelps Brown, and the work done in his two years there resulted in a dissertation for an Oxford D.Phil. Degree (1940). In 1939 Shackle was appointed to the Economics Department of St Andrews University. He then spent the war years in Sir Winston Churchill's Statistical Branch of the Cabinet Office and several years thereafter in the Economics Section of the Cabinet Secretariat. In 1950 he was made Reader in Economic Theory at Leeds University, and in 1951 Brunner Professor of Economic Science at Liverpool University, where he remained until his retirement in 1969. Shackle was Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York, 1957-8, and at Pittsburgh University 1966-7. After his retirement he continued to lecture regularly. Shackle married Susan Rowe in 1939: they had two sons and two daughters. Susan died in 1978 and in 1979 Shackle married Catherine Gibb (née Weldsmith). He lived in retirement in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and died there on 3 March 1992. He was buried at St Peter and St Paul, Aldeburgh. Under the terms of the will of Catherine Shackle, St Edmund's College established the G L S Shackle Studentship, tenable for one year, the holder of which undertakes to produce a scholarly paper on the writings of G L S Shackle.