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The year 1932 is widely seen as a turning point in the history of nuclear physics. Read any scholarly history or popular treatment of the subject, and you will almost certainly find reference to a spectacular triptych of discoveries made in that year. James Chadwick discovered the neutron – the first uncharged subatomic particle to be identified. Carl Anderson identified the position – the positively charged counterpart of the electron. And John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton used a particle accelerator to perform the first artificial disintegration of the atomic nucleus.

D ^""^k ryden's final volume of poetry, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), is often viewed as a dignified, wise farewell, a mature and mellow set of reflections on change, permanence, life, and love that acknowledges the fluidity of things in its own shifts of perspective from tale to tale. It is seen, somewhat sentimentally, as an old man's book, spiked with a few political barbs by an old Jacobite at the expense of King William's government. Dryden is unquestionably concerned with the grand themes, and it is difficult to isolate stable positions in the play of translated voices or in the ambiguities of his digressive original poems. This view of the volume fails to recognize, however, that the work is a product of the 169os and of a culture that was undergoing tumultuous change, and does not acknowledge Dryden's position in that culture. Over the preceding forty years he had been not only one of the most astute commentators on literature and political matters but also, among figures in the public arena, the one most committed to finding new ways of talking about what surrounded him-from the appropriations of his opponents' discourse in Annus Mirabilis, through the multiple ironies and figurative experiments of Threnodia Augustalis, to the exploitation of translation as a form of subversive expression in his Virgil and Juvenal. Dryden remained near the center of literary culture through the end of the century, and Fables carries forward his experimental, political line. The Dedication and Preface initiate this discovery of ways to pose and critique the problems of Williamite culture. There Dryden plays with notions of genealogy and succession in order to create a line for himself, one that is ostentatiously apolitical while actually engaging in politically motivated appropriation at every turn. He affiliates himself with Milton, who among poets had perhaps the most contentious reputation during the 169os, and makes this radical his ancestor, stepping outside politics while drawing the political into his argument. In writing on Chaucer, he again seems to set politics aside but in fact uses his medieval predecessor to figure his own situation in a political register. In the actual translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio in the volume, the notions of

If 1963, as Philip Larkin claims, was a good year for sexual intercourse, it was an annus mirabilis for John Cleland's first novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Since its initial publication in two installments in November 1748 and February 1749, the Memoirs had been a best seller but an illicit one.2 Although entirely free from vulgar terminology, it contains more explicit descriptions of a broad range of sexual practices than any previous work in English. Government action against the novel began in November 1749, when a warrant was issued for the arrest of the author, the printer, and the publishers. Cleland and his associates were found guilty in court, and the novel was withdrawn, at least officially, from circulation. Despite losing the case, however, Cleland seems to have escaped lightly; no record of any punishment exists. Shortly after his release, Cleland produced a heavily bowdlerized version of the Memoirs, entitled Memoirs of Fanny Hill,3 published in March 1750.4 Readers, not surprisingly, eschewed this anodyne, ostensibly didactic abridgement in favor of the banned original, which circulated widely in underground form for over two hundred years

Of all the revolutions that took place during the annus mirabilis 1989, only the Romanian one was violent. The paper explores the sources of the Romanian different path, the extraordinary vitality of the authoritarian mentalities and practices in that country, the commingling of Leninist and Byzantine traditions in a uniquely cynical and manipulative formation. This may explain why, despite the ostensible radicalism and strong-worded, overblown rhetoric of the revolutionary paragons, the Leninist heritage in Romania has turned out to be more persistent and resilient than in other countries.

When Coleridge left England for the Mediterranean in April, 1804, he had a long list of reasons to go, and they were all personal: poor health, a tiresome wife, a love affair with a woman without hope of consummation, and failed "genial spirits." There was little chance that the Mediterranean could have cured any of these, even his health. As Thomas Beddoes had warned, the last thing Coleridge needed was a hot, humid climate. True enough, Coleridge came back in August, 1806, in worse shape than when he left: tired, unhappy, undecided and addicted (Dorothy Wordsworth was absolutely shocked). And yet only three years later in The Friend, Coleridge declared to his unsuspecting readers that "the fifteen months from May 1804, to October 1805 [were], in many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of my life" (II 253, I 533). (1) These were, of course, the months spent in the service of the Civil Commissioner of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball, first as under-secretary then as acting public secretary. In the latter case, Coleridge was, lest we forget, second in command of the principal British protectorate in the Mediterranean after Gibraltar, a post that came with a big desk, plenty of paper work and considerable responsibilities none of which Coleridge particularly enjoyed. What was it then about being in the civil service that led Coleridge to call it "the most memorable and instructive period of my life"? It has been a long time since critics have considered this question. Donald Sultana, who wrote the book on the subject, Coleridge in Malta and Italy (1969), accumulated a vast amount of historical detail relating both to Coleridge's daily activities and to the movements of armies, navies and public policy in the period. For this reason the book is indispensable. But in the picture of Coleridge mismanaging himself and his affairs for two disastrous years, there is no doubt where the author's judgment lies; this is a slacker, a well-spoken and well-meaning but little deserving recipient of patronage who wasted opportunities rather than capitalized on them. Malta was a failure. Like much high-minded moral criticism of Coleridge in this Hazlittian-Arnoldian-Levisite vein, it is not that far from the truth. Wordsworth could find visionary dreariness in a desolate landscape but Coleridge was simply depressed by it, and Malta, as he repeatedly complained, was very hot and very dreary. Coleridge felt stranded on a lonely British outpost, writing ministry reports he only half believed in, tiring of his small-minded compatriots and the superstitious locals, toiling around Maltese villages on horseback with Ball by day while drowning his love for Sara Hutchinson in increasing amounts of Opium by night. Tedious tasks were a welcome distraction from his ills, but indolence was hard to fight and sometimes he simply let it get the upper hand. But if Malta was no annus mirabilis, it was hardly inconsequential for Coleridge's career in the way Sultana sometimes implies. Many have described the spiritual isolation Coleridge experienced in Malta and how this, along with the newly emergent anti-Catholic prejudice, led to a reorientation of his religious commitment, the first step toward "Spiritual Religion." In Kathleen Coburn's 1960 account--and the notebooks mostly bear this out--Coleridge was a keen observer of nature and an erudite confidant of the Civil Commission, clever in matters of state and personal psychology. Elinor Shaffer (1989), and Edorado Zuccato (1996), have shown how important the Mediterranean sojourn was for Coleridge's ideas of art, art criticism, metrics and Renaissance philosophy. All those restless nights spent reading Italian would pay huge dividends when it came to defending his poetics in the Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism and in Biographia Literaria. But what about all those days, though, spent at work in the palace of the Knights of St. John? What were the dividends of these? …

During the last two decades, in particular since the annus mirabilis 1989, Italy has been faced with increasing migration flows from Central and Eastern Europe and the Third World. Immigrants, although in their vast majority illegal, have settled in the country thus challenging the political and cultural order of the nation-state.The hypothesistested in this paper is that their presence activates a process of re-definition of the Italian identity in an exclusionary way so as to raise symbolic, if not material, boundaries between Us and Them. The study is divided into three sections. First, the main features that characterise Italian identity will be examined and the civic or ethnic character of the nation will be highlighted. Second, recent migratory flows towards Italy will be described and the developmentof xenophobic attitudes in the country will be assessed. Third, the hypothesis regarding the transformation of national identity will be tested through the analysis of the press discourse on immigration...

The year 1783 has been referred to in Europe as the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ or ‘Year of Awe’ given the large number of extreme climatic, volcanic and tectonic events that took place. An unusually hot summer of 1783 in western Europe, followed by one of the most severe winters (1783–1784) in the northern hemisphere, an unusual ‘deadly’ haze that covered it down to rather low latitudes, poor crops in various places... On the same year, volcanoes erupted around the world (Etna, Stromboli, Vesuvius, Asama) and earthquakes shook Calabria. Last and probably foremost was the second largest historical basaltic fissure eruption at Laki (Iceland) from June 1783 to February 1784. Only two months after the onset of the eruption, Mourgue de Montredon [4], in a lecture to the Royal Academy of Montpellier (France), noted the coincidence of extreme weather conditions and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This was followed by the better-publicized contribution of Benjamin Franklin [6]. The paper by Montredon, which was published in the Memoirs of the French Academy of Sciences a few years later [4], is a remarkable piece of careful observation in real time, with daily measurements of temperature, humidity, wind characteristics

Although Sir Ronald Belsey once called the year 1904 “annus mirabilis,” it is actually the year 1913 that stands out as the true milestone in esophageal surgery. Within a year, Torek performed the first transpleural resection for cancer in the thoracic esophagus, Zaaijer successfully resected the distal esophagus through the transpleural route, Heller performed the first myotomy for achalasia, and it was also the year of Ach's pioneering transmediastinal esophagectomy. Previously, in 1912, after a series of animal experiments by Beck and Jianu, Roepke successfully used the greater curvature of the stomach as a presternal conduit. Other previous approaches included reconstruction with jejunum (Roux—1907), colon (Kelling—1911), and skin tube (Bircher—1907). Several technical advances made these operations possible, most of all were the giant leaps in the perioperative medicine.

The trial of Penguin Books in 1960 for the publication of Lady Chatterley 's Lover and its 'not guilty' verdict did not establish a uniform climate of liberalisation across the UK. In particular, the defence of literary merit as an expression of the 'public good' did not become an absolute criterion in judging the obscenity of any particular title. The freedom from legal censorship of publishing and bookselling rolled out slowly from the centre after 1960 and was to receive a setback in the 1964 trial, and subsequent appeal, of Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book.Keywords: 1960s, Scotland, Trocchi, Calder, Lady Chatterley's Lover, obscene publications, obscenity trials, public good.This chapter examines the significance of the 1964 trial for obscenity of Alexander Trocchi's novel Cain 's Book published by John Calder. That significance can be seen not only within the narrow focus of a subset of book history that considers the shifting relationships between authors, publishers and the state but also within the broader context of the cultural history of the 1960s in Scotland and the UK. Indeed, the trial of Cain 's Book represents an interesting intersection of book history and cultural history where the pedantic attention to detail that often characterises the former can be used beneficially to qualify the sweeping generalisations typical of the latter. The 1960s as a decade possesses a set of strong, simplified associations that are reinforced through popular expressions and popularising histories. Not least of these associations is that of the 1960s as a period of sexual liberation and revolution. Few commentators on the decade fail to quote Philip Larkin's verse from Annus Mirabilis:Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(which was rather late for me)Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.Even fewer fail to appropriate the 1960 trial in London of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover from book history; they do so in order to provide an illustration that will define a rather homogeneous portrait of the decade. The fortuitous date of the novel's transition to legal legitimacy provides a starting point for accounts of the liberalisation of British society. For the cultural historian, the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover marks a boundary between the repressive 1950s and the liberated 1960s, an instance of the 'immense freeing or unbinding of social energies' that Fredric Jameson argued to be characteristic of the latter decade.2 The 'end of the Chatterley ban', in this reading, represents a new Zeitgeist in the UK - with swinging London at its centre.Randall Stevenson, for example, notes that 'Penguin's victory had many implications during - and beyond - the decade that followed' and uses it as one of the key starting points of his masterly review of British cultural history of the last half of the twentieth century.3 This interpretation echoes a long line of synoptic histories through which the 1960s as a decade is 'remembered'.4 They reflect and privilege a metropolitan experience and perspective in which this Old Bailey trial with a London-based jury was perceived to be the end of the war against censorship rather than a one-off victory. In particular, the trial verdict seemed to have allowed an absolute right of publication to those works where literary merit or the public good were attested to or validated by expert witnesses. The subsequent appearance of innovative texts, primarily films and novels, challenging orthodox beliefs and social norms, represented an artistic will to exploit this seeming new immunity. Many of these commentators on the decade are passing judgement, thumbs up or thumbs down, on the social and cultural 'revolution' of the 1960s but, whatever their stance, all accept that a revolution, with its implications of sudden, radical change, did take place. What this chapter disputes is not the effect of the revolution but whether there was really a revolution at all as opposed to gradual change seeping out from the centre. …

In August 1759, Hugh Montgomery, an officer enlisted in the British regiments deployed on the continent, wrote to his mother Catherine at their family estate in Greyabbey, County Down, from an infantry encampment at Paderborn in the German province of Westphalia. Hugh was the second son of the current Lord of Rosemont House on the largely Presbyterian Ards Peninsula. Montgomery, excited by his experiences on the frontline, gave his mother a dramatic first-hand account of the recent battle of Minden, one of the pinnacle engagements in Britain’s annus mirabilis — or year of miracles. He told her of how he narrowly escaped death twice during the engagement. First, when a cannon ball tore through the rank of soldiers immediately in front of him, killing a few men from his regiment but miraculously leaving him unscathed, and then again when a French musket ball grazed his collarbone. He concluded the letter by stating that he regretted that he was unable to inform her of any substantial intelligence involving the overall state of the campaign, instead assuring her that ‘Francis Joy’, the founding editor of the Belfast News-Letter, ‘will give you a better account, than I can at present’.1 This brief statement — to a no doubt concerned mother — reveals several points about the place of the regional press in Ulster society during the Seven Years War.

Books reviewed in this article: Richard Cork, Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s Richard Cork, New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980s Richard Cork, Breaking Down The Barriers: Art in the 1990s Richard Cork, Annus Mirabilis? Art in the Year 2000

It may seem faintly absurd to claim or imply that a Vergilian cento has suffered unjustified neglect from scholars. These works—of which there are sixteen, covering a period of over three centuries within Late Antiquity—are usually treated at best with amused tolerance, and at worst (as in the newAnthologia Latino) with angry disdain. Though always ingenious, sometimes funny, and occasionally informative about the reception of Vergil, they are seldom admired. Even among Italian scholars, some of whom have paid much attention to centos, a recession has set in since theannus mirabilisof 1981, which saw two editions of theMedeaof Hosidius Geta. Proba has, deservedly, attracted more attention than most; her aims and methods as a Christian poetess were carefully and illuminatingly studied twenty years ago by Reinhard Herzog, and her interest as a female Roman aristocrat has brought her further attention, especially in recent years. The main aim of the present article is to suggest a particular context and a serious purpose for her cento. A postscript will show that it went on to enjoy considerable popularity until the end of the century, and an introductory section will discuss its date, but very briefly, since Matthews has convincingly said most of what needs to be said about a recent attempt to redate it. Proba's preface, much of it not in cento form, calls for detailed treatment from various angles—textual, literary, historical—and will be explored in a separate article.

Nineteen eighty-nine appeared to be anannus mirabilisin Soviet language policy; during that year, nine of fifteen Soviet republics adopted laws that championed the language of the titular nationality. Among these was Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian republic where Russian had increasingly marginalized the language of the Kyrgyz.

It all began a very long time ago, sometime before 1876, that annus mirabilis of librarianship during which the American Library Association was founded, Library Journal debuted, and Samuel Green published in its pages the first article about reference librarianship. And it continues today. In April 1994, an unidentified library school student from the State University of New York at Buffalo queried the participants of the LIBREFL listserv, asking them, “Can you give a summary of the ‘hot’ library reference issues of the week? I'm working on a project for my Reference course, and would like to find out what is REALLY vital to refernce (sic) librarians out there today.” I was tempted to reply that all of that week's “hot” issues were identified in Green's 1876 article. In that article describing the phenomenon we today call reference service, Green touched on issues such as the librarian's obligation to provide information without injecting personal values, the inability of any librarian to know everything, the need sometimes to refer a patron to another information agency, SDI services, the value of proactive rather than passive service, the challenges of the reference interview, and, of course, what has come to be called the “information versus instruction debate.”

In 1917, while suffering from writer’s block following the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations , T.S. Eliot composed six poems in French as a creative experiment. Although four of the poems were subsequently published and remained in print thereafter at the poet’s direction, they have received relatively little critical attention and are typically dismissed as a picturesque detour en route to the annus mirabilis of The Waste Land . But Eliot’s French suite gave voice to new sonorities and tonal registers that would “translate” not only to The Waste Land but also to Four Quartets , while also, curiously, strengthening his ties to the metaphysical poets of the English canon.

This article focuses on the wonder years enjoyed by Germany in 1989 that followed the great German unification. In 1989–1990, the two Germanies underwent a series of remarkable changes that would signal the end of the postwar division of Europe. East Germans peacefully toppled the hard-line Socialist Unity Party that had ruled with an iron fist for forty years. This article traces the revolutions that raged East Germany and its effects on the other part of the country. East Germany witnessed mass exodus resulting in labor shortages and other such problems. As East Germans fled in the summer of 1989, pro-democracy activists formed civic groups calling for reform. This article also explains the involvement of the two states in bringing down the iron curtain and unifying Germany. This article also explains the form of chancellor democracy, new economy that came to dominate the new found Germany.

In the whole modern history of China the year 1919 certainly deserves the name annus mirabilis. The long series of memorable events beginning with the Fourth of May and ending in the teachers’ strike during the last weeks of the year, are too well known to require mentioning here. But the real miracle of the year seems to be the marked change in the thoughts and ideas of the nation. So rapid indeed has been the spread of the intellectual transformation that it even astounded those who have entertained the wildest expectations for its final triumph.

After the year spent at the Kanton Schule in Aarau, Einstein was admitted to the Institute in Zurich, and began as a student seeking an engineering degree (as his father wished) but later switched to being a teacher – obtaining in the end a teacher’s certificate for physics and mathematics. At the Institute (hereafter the ETH) he spent more time in the laboratories than in the classroom, enjoying the hands-on approach of experimental physics, a behavior probably going back to his childhood time spent in his father’s factory.

The year 2005, under the auspices of the United Nations Organization (UNO), was celebrated as the International (or World) Year of Physics. It was as much in the memory of that Annus Mirabilis (Miracle Year) of 1905 in which Albert Einstein published his five famous papers [1–5] more than a century ago, as to honor their author himself by the whole world together. We now know the profound effects those five papers [1–5] have had not only on the development of science, in general, and physics, in particular; but also on the evolution, through these developments, of the human civilization we are enjoying today. One [1] of the five papers which Einstein wrote in the Annus Mirabilis, provided an explanation of the experimentally observed photoelectric effect [6, 7].

It may seem paradoxical to analyse the nature and the work of melancholy in Keats’s poetic creation without concentrating on the celebrated “Ode on Melancholy”, written in May 1819, in the height of the annus mirabilis. And it may seem somewhat provocative to choose instead Endymion, written two years before, in 1817, a notoriously “long poem”, as critics (taking up Keats’s own phrase) usually say to present it— a hardly engaging epithet to the 20th or 21st century poetry reader who shares Ez...

For South Africa 1994 was an Annus Mirabilis. Despite pre-election predictions of violent disruption, the country's first democratic general election took place in an atmosphere of reconciliation and hope for a future in which past injustice would be rectified and the ‘new South Africa’ welcomed back into the international community. For a brief moment — and, of course, it might not last as the inevitable constraints imposed by scarce resources, rising expectations and external pressures complicate decision making — South Africa appeared to have taken a major step towards Nelson Mandela's goal of a ‘nation united in diversity’. Certainly, one striking feature of the four-year transition was the willingness of the elites engaged in the negotiating process to accommodate each other as they sought to reach agreement on a new constitution in a spirit of ‘consensus and compromise’. And the same spirit is meant to inspire the day-to-day working of the Government of National Unity and Reconstruction (GNU) which, in effect, is a grand coalition of all the major talents.

The most gifted and distinguished natural philosopher in the history of the world. Born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England, on December 25, 1642, Newton was the son of a yeoman, Isaac, and his wife, Hannah. Three months before his birth, Newton's father died. His mother remarried when Isaac was two, and subsequently left him with his grandmother, Margery, to start a new family. Extremely interested in mechanical devices and chemicals as a young boy, Newton divided time between school and his family's farm. His uncle, an Anglican pastor, recognized his raw talent and arranged for Isaac to attend Trinity College at Cambridge in 1661, where he appeared to be an average student. Newton graduated from Cambridge in 1665, about the time the plague hit, and so he returned to his family's farm until 1667. These months at home were the annus mirabilis of his scientific career. During this brief period, Newton formulated a theory of gravitation, the three laws of motion, discovered the secret of light, color, and optics, and invented the science of mechanics and the mathematics of calculus (or “fluxions” to Newton) — all of which he very slowly and very reluctantly made public throughout the remainder of his life. In 1667, Newton returned to Trinity under the apprenticeship of Isaac Barrow. Worldwide recognition started in 1668 with his invention of the reflecting telescope. He became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, holding the chair for 33 years, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1672. He published the first edition of his greatest work, the Principia, in 1687 and it quickly became the most important work in science ever published until the 20th century. Newton represented Cambridge in Parliament in 1689, and again in 1701–1702. He sought out and was given the per-functory post of Warden of the Mint in London in 1696, and was made Master of the Mint in 1699; he personally initiated many reforms at the mint. In 1703, Newton became the President of the Royal Society, a post he held for 24 years until his death, on March 20, 1727. Knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, he spent the remainder of his life defending his theories, dabbling in alchemy, and writing theology, having become the most famous living natural philosopher in the western world. He was a lifelong bachelor. Keywords: Newton, Isaac (1642–1727); gifted and distinguished natural philosopher; Newton's reputation, as the greatest scientist of the modern world; Newton's theological passions, biblical prophecy and christology; pursuit of God by every means and capacity

In this paper I would like to analyze the relationship between Mach and Einstein. Ernst Mach was born in 1838 and died in 1916 aged seventy-eight. The last eighteen years of his life were heavily overshadowed by the consequences of a stroke which occurred in 1898, i.e., seven years before Einstein’s annus mirabilis. Mach suffered paralysis on the right side of his body, heavy speech impairment, and had a painful bladder condition which required him to be catheterized at least twice-a-day. In addition, he suffered from a severe sleeping disorder, neuralgia, and the sometimes severe consequences of frequent falls. The reason for mentioning Mach’s poor state of health is that it has much to do with his relationship to Einstein, or, for that matter, to relativity theory.

The paper explores the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, including the parallels in the trajectories of their scientific careers, starting with the annus mirabilis of 1905. Noting how they shared much in common, the paper underlines that it was as ‘great Jewish thinkers’ that they were most often twinned, and proceeds to compare and contrast the development of their self-consciousness of being Jewish. It then traces their relationship in one meeting and in correspondence, both private and public, from 1926 to their deaths, emphasizing Freud's envy of Einstein and Einstein's ambivalent admiration of Freud. The paper ends with a consideration of the significance of the figure of Moses in both of their final years.

The fourth act of Prometheus Unbound records the effects of loving-kindness as the new boundary condition for universal relations and verbally celebrates the arrival of outer revolution realized through inner transformation. The mythic key to Shelley’s poetic operations in Prometheus reflects his “deeply held commitment to the oneness of human experience” (Curran Annus Mirabilis 103). Shelley was well-versed in this type of knowledge through a “copious reading project” that included Oriental studies from Sir William Jones’s Works and Robertson’s Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India but which was also informed by British literary works of Oriental interest by Byron, Elphinstone, Faber, Owenson, Southey, and others (M. Williams 171–2). The scientifically-oriented view of myth pursued by Western scholars extended enlightenment methods to categorize mythic representation, leading to the construction of a family of world religions that ultimately included Buddhism (King 44–8; Masuzawa 125–38). This procedure, as prior analysis in chapters 1 and 2 indicates, was deeply bound up with Oriental colonialism, and Shelley was not immune to the appropriation of Asiatic knowledge for literary effects, a point made in different ways in studies by Leask (1–12) and Makdisi (1–22, 100–21).

The period between the 1950s and the 1970s is generally held as an era of profound transitions in Irish society, marking the end of Eamon de Valera’s traditional Catholic nationalist Ireland and generating the birth of a new modern postnationalist Irish state. Luke Gibbons (1996: 82) asserts that the year 1959, in which Sean F. Lemass was appointed Taoiseach, is ‘with revisionist hindsight taken as the annus mirabilis of modern Ireland… dispelling the mists of traditionalism which had obscured the path to progress and industrialisation… [and breaking] with the protectionist policies of the previous generation [in order to extend] an open welcome to foreign investment and multinational capital’. The Republic’s 1973 entry into the European Union (then EEC) consolidated these developments, exposing its society to what Gibbons (82) tellingly describes as ‘the ways of the world’. There is, then, a distinct turning point or rupture posited to have occurred during this epoch, which is based on what Fredric Jameson (2002b: 25) describes as ‘a powerful act of dissociation whereby the present seals off its past from itself and expels and ejects it’. In this regard, Joe Cleary (2007: 8) argues that ‘post-1960s “Lemass’s Ireland” [is set up against] de Valera’s Ireland [as] its repudiated antithesis’.

'The practice of Elizabethan drama cannot be easily brought into focus for us by the statements of Renaissance literary criticism.' So writes George K. Hunter in a recent essay on 'Elizabethan Theatrical Genres and Literary Theory'. However, if we use the word theory rather loosely to mean a 'set of ideas', then perhaps we can discern a fairly clear line of development in the ideas of tragedy from the Middle Ages to the annus mirabilis of English Renaissance tragedy: 1587. This was the year which saw the appearance not only of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great , but also, most probably, of Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy - the play which opens the sequence presented for analysis in the present volume. In this short essay, I shall try to give an account of at least some of the main features of this 'theory', from the late medieval period, to the new neo-classical theory which emerged in a 'strong' form in the mid-Tudor period, and developed into a more moderate (though not exactly 'weak') form in the early and mid-Elizabethan period. Then, I shall return to the two great plays already mentioned, in order to argue that we are in danger of missing a 'lost tradition' of early Renaissance tragedy which extends up to and beyond the watershed years of the late 1580s. As it happens, there are literally hundreds of works which might be described as the 'antecedents' of English Renaissance tragedy, so we shall only be able to look at a few of those which seem to me most important or interesting; but they should suffice to give us a decent picture of the spacious and energetic tradition of tragic composition and performance up to Kyd and Marlowe.

Annus mirabilis was 1960 for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “Myoglobin is the H-atom and hemoglobin the H2-molecule of molecular biology”, a quote attributed to J. C. Kendrew and M. F. Perutz. For approximately half-a-century, myoglobin and hemoglobin have been ideal and versatile models for studying the structure–function relationships in globular proteins. The work carried out by Perutz to unveil the molecular basis of allosteric cooperativity, the mechanism of molecular diseases and adaptation to physiological requirements are briefly outlined.

In spite of the oil impasse and other domestic difficulties, 1951 was Mosaddeq’s annus mirabilis. He had nationalized oil, extricated Iran from the grip of British hegemony, and demonstrated that a weak nation could stand up for its rights even when faced with a superpower. By year-end, he had been picked by Time Magazine as ‘Man of the Year’ for 1951 (Figure 12). However, the road ahead was treacherous; the first test appeared soon after the new Majles began its work.

Early June 1797: a cold wet summer illuminated by one famous meeting, crucial to our construction of Romanticism. A young man is running along a Dorset road. Suddenly, his end in view, he leaps ‘over a gate’ and, taking a short cut, he bounds ‘down the pathless field’.1 Coleridge has arrived at Racedown. The annus mirabilis has begun.

1989 was described as ‘annus mirabilis’, and its revolutions hailed as one of the great moments in human history. In subsequent years, the re-emergence of war, genocide and terror led to re-interpretation: Europe became a dark continent, the 20th century its darkest hour. Was 1989 merely a bright moment in a dark age?This contribution acknowledges European war, genocide and terror and examines in some detail the contribution of this history to the self-limiting or negotiated revolutions of 1989. It is argued that horrific violence – Stalinist terror, World War II, the Cold War as well as genocide, ethnic cleansing and deportation – resulted processes that contributed to the revolutions of 1989 in the following ways:• The legacy of Stalinist terror resulted in a structural stasis that prefigured the breakdown of the Soviet empire;• Integration into global warfare enabled the perpetuation of Soviet rule but also provided the window of opportunity for overturning the Soviet legacy: • State building was constrained by the Soviet imperial cage but ultimately resulted in independent states and societies able to purposefully organise change after 1989.The argument is that the self-limiting or negotiated revolution of 1989 (Staniszkis 1984, Lawson 2005) was more than just a utopian moment in that it contains a new idea for organizing large-scale, rapid social and political change, which is relevant the twenty-first century. Contrary to received historical wisdom, revolutions may in future be the non-violent means of organising large-scale and rapid change, if negotiated.

The year 1989 will in future generations be known as the annus mirabilis, not only as far as developments in Eastern Europe are concerned, but also within the context of South African politics. The September general elections for the tricameral Parliament marked a turning point in the direction of governmental policies. Nowhere has the changing mood been more clearly demonstrated than in the streets of the cities and towns. A countrywide spate of protest marches has occurred since the historic first government-approved peaceful anti-apartheid march in Cape Town on 13 September 1989, and these have become the most visible symptom of the advance to the so-called ‘new South Africa’.

It was in 1960, the year of independence and therefore a time of celebration and festivities in Nigeria, that Wole Soyinka, after just over five years in Britain (three at the University of Leeds and two at the Royal Court Theatre, London), returned to his native land. This was moreover, according to some sources, a period in which he undertook empirical research into festivities of a different kind, which subsequently supplied a specific input into the ritualism of his early plays.

In the year 1471 a member of the Sorbonne, Guillaume Fichet, looking back on the history of what today we should call communication technology, divided it into three periods: antiquity (which used the calamus or reed pen), a subsequent period which we should identify as the Middle Ages (which used the penna or quill pen), and a period just beginning (which used aereae litterae or print).' Just over five hundred years later an American scholar, Walter J. Ong, looking back on a longer historical span, divided it into orality, writing, printing, and electronic communications.2 No matter how much these two figures may differ over details, they occupy a similar position: each stands at the start of a communications shift which has alerted him to changes in the past, and Ong claims explicitly that contrasts "between electronic media and print have sensitized us to the earlier contrast between writing and orality."3 We do not have to go as far as Eric A. Havelock, who suggests that our new awareness can be precisely dated by a number of publications appearing in the annus mirabilis 1963 (among which we are hardly surprised to see one of his own),4 in order to accept the general point that recent work has been stimulated by recent technology. On the face of it such developments might appear to leave medievalists out in the cold, especially if we take into account Jack Goody's wide-ranging historical view that intellectual revolutions followed the introduction of rev

In 1956 Harold Pinter trod the boards in Bournemouth and Torquay in over thirty thrillers and comedies, the standard repertory company staple of the pre- and post-war periods, while J. B. Priestley, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan dominated the West End theatre with comforting spiritualism, stylish comedy of manners and sentimentalised social problem play, all designed to reassure the self-applauding middle-class patrons, through laughter or tears. Alternatively, by the early 1950s, the plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams with their contrasting realistic modes of incidental expressionism ( Death of a Salesman , 1949) and passionate naturalism (A Streetcar Named Desire , 1947) were quite free from the all-constrictive self-censorship of the British class system dominated by virtual terror of the vulgar and lower class. Along with changing post-war social conditions the seeming freedom signalled by the Americans provided an impetus for the rise of the Angry Young Men (pre-eminently John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and John Arden) at the Royal Court Theatre, from the annus mirabilis of 1956. Of equal importance, but less sensational in immediate impact was the translation of French absurdism, most famously Samuel Beckett and Eugcne Ionesco, to London productions at the Arts Theatre (respectively, Waiting for Godot , 1955; The New Tenant , 1956).

In November 1960 a jury comprising nine men and three women decided that the publication of the full text of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was for the public good. The trial of the publisher, Penguin Books, excited a great deal of media interest. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover, beyond its status as a novel, is the most notorious example of literary censorship in the twentieth century, and the novel’s strange and fascinating history still holds many secrets.’ This is how one commentator on the book’s production history begins his summing up of the significance of D.H. Lawrence’s final novel.1 Philip Larkin, in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1974), acknowledged ‘the end of the Chatterley ban’ as a milestone, for others if not for him.

Die Revolte der Studenten und Jugendlichen in den 1960er Jahren und insbesondere in dem annus mirabilis ›1968‹ war ein globales Phanomen, dessen Ausmase von zeitgenossischen Beobachtern, enthusiastischen Befurworten und erbosten Kritikern gleichsam erkannt wurde. Ein Bericht des amerikanischen Nachrichtendienstes CIA mit dem Titel »Restless Youth« kam im September 1968 zu dem Schluss: »Youthful dissidence, involving students and non-students alike, is a world-wide phenomenon. […] Because of the revolution in communications, the ease of travel, and the evolution of society everywhere, student behavior never again will resemble what it was when education was reserved for the elite. […] Thanks to the riots in West Berlin, Paris, and New York and sit-ins in more than twenty other countries in recent months, student activism has caught the attention of the world.«1

International audience; The title of the meeting at which this paper was originally presented - 'The contribution of physics to the study of the living' - found its origin and justification in the celebration of that annus mirabilis, 1905. But it also sounded like a sequel to a long tradition of unbalanced relations between physics and biology. The present vexed interdisciplinary relations between the two disciplines cannot be understood without a knowledge of this historical background. Yet focusing on traditional misunderstandings between physicists and biologists would somehow be a mistake, because similar difficulties of communication occur even within the life sciences - a population geneticist and a molecular biologist have very little in common, and use different modes of explanation - and I guess the same is true within physics. To the apparently simple (or at least traditional) problem of relations between disciplines should be added the major difficulty of interweaving the diverse explanatory schemes belonging to different disciplines.

Einstein and the Search for Unification (D Gross) Einstein and Geometry (M Atiyah) String Theory and Einstein's Dream (A Sen) Black Hole Entropy in String Theory: A Window into the Quantum Structure of Gravity (A Dabholkar) The Winding Road to Quantum Gravity (A Ashtekar) Brownian Functionals in Physics and Computer Science (S N Majumdar) Bose-Einstein Condensation: Where Many Become One and So There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom (N Kumar) Many Electrons Strongly Avoiding Each Other: Strange Goings On (T V Ramakrishnan) Einstein and the Quantum (V Singh) Einstein's Legacy: Relativistic Cosmology (J V Narlikar) Einstein's Universe: The Challenge of Dark Energy (S Sarkar) Gravitational Radiation -- In Celebration of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis (B S Sathyaprakash) Albert Einstein: Radical Pacifist and Democrat (T Jayaraman).