We will give a complete review of classical and modern insurance risk theory through the eyes of excursion theory for Lévy processes. To keep the technical requir ements to a minimum, the course will dea l largely with the case of the classical Cramér - Lundberg process, developing in detail the Poissonian structure of sojourns from th e maximum and minimum, moving towards the end of the course into a mor e general Lévy set - up. The objective is to go far beyond the classica l ruin problems, into the realms of dividend strategies which correspond to refracted, reflected and super - and sub - reflected Lévy processes a s well as focusing on the imp ortance of the modern theory of scale functions for spectrally negative Lévy processes in the analysis. Much of what will be presented will cover, at the appropriate level, the main developments that have occurred in the last 5 - 10 years in the research literature.