The subject of phase transitions and critical phenomena in statistical mechanics is a rich source of interesting and difficult mathematical problems. There has been considerable success in solving such problems for systems in spatial dimension 2, or in high dimensions, but not in dimension 3. This lecture is intended to provide an introduction to recent work that employs a renormalisation group method to study spin systems and self-avoiding walk in dimension 4 (joint with Bauerschmidt and Brydges), as well as long-range versions of these models in dimensions 1, 2, 3 via an "epsilon expansion".