Abstract: Abstract For your eighteenth birthday, this milestone of adulthood, I’m writing you this letter. A plea for the accused? An explanation for more under standing, if need be posthumously? A justification? A testament for later, for when you are in more reflective mood? I think that mothers always look back at the birth on the occasion of the birthdays of their children; it is such an overwhelming event that you want, maybe have to relive it.

Abstract: Abstract By the mid 1980s chronic fatigue syndrome had arrived. The story of the next ten years is the story of the professional community attempting to catch up on the dramatic entry of CFS into the public arena, and to bring the traditional methods of scientific inquiry to bear on the problem. As in all such endeavours, the appropriate starting point was to establish a case definition of the new syndrome. This was recognized with the publication in 1988 of what became known as the CDC or Holmes’ criteria1• This was a milestone in the acceptance of the syndrome and the beginning of a new generation of scientific studies.

Abstract: Abstract Fifty percent of deaths of the aged occur in the three months following their birthdays, while only 10 percent occur in the three months preceding their birthdays. People hold on to observe a final milestone. The completion of story has its own inner drive and promise. But we do not know what form it will take; sometimes we do not know how to begin. In recent decades there has been a recovery of the significance of narrative or story in theology.

Abstract: Abstract The dramatist and poet Ernst Toller (1893-1939), generally classed as one of the leading German expressionist playwrights, was no ivory-tower writer: his prominent involvement with the uprising in Munich in 1918-19 caused him to be gaoled for four years after the defeat of the revolutionaries by government troops. He wrote the contemporary allegory Masses and Man (1920) as well as three further political plays in prison. The production of Masses and Man at the Berlin Volksb ühne in 1921, while the author was still in gaol, represented a milestone in non-naturalistic staging technique, especially in its bold use of spotlights.

Abstract: Abstract ‘Drawing on material he had sketched fairly fully between December 1945 and February 1946, Copland began his Clarinet Concerto, commissioned by Benny Goodman, while on a lecture tour of Latin America in the fall of 1947. He interrupted work on it because a request from Republic Pictures for a score for Lewis Milestone’s The Red Pony was “too good to turn down,” and then wrote Four Piano Blues, finally coming back to the Concerto in August 1948 after his summer teaching stint at Tanglewood. The first performance, on 6 November 1950, was a broadcast by Benny Goodman with Fritz Reiner and the NBC Symphony; the first public concert performance was given on 28 November 1950 by Ralph Mclane, with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. The score is dedicated to Goodman.