After the discovery of the BRST identities in 1974 Raymond spent some two years mostly on instantons. In those years we had a small group at the Centre Physique Théorique in Marseille discussing the physics and mathematics of instantons. The upshot of our discussions can be found in a set of lectures given by Raymond in Erice in 1977 and a year later in a Physics Reports volume. I present some recollections of that period; mostly how we were influenced by the twistor approach. I discuss the Atiyah–Drinfeld–Hitchin–Manin (ADHM) method to obtain instantons (“calorons”) in thermal QCD following earlier work. The building blocks are a prepotential and a gauge invariant propagator. Then I will give surprisingly simple results in terms of these building blocks for the one loop vacuum response to a change in caloron parameters and some physical consequences for the effective action.