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This account of Vera Bacskai's contribution to European urban history after 1990 is a personal narrative, written by a friend and collaborator. It argues that her role was multi-dimensional. It was founded on her major publications on Budapest and small towns, shedding a crucial East Central European light on European urbanization. It was underpinned by her participation in various international projects like the EU TEMPUS programme which created strong institutional bonds with Western universities as well as opportunities for Hungarian students through exchange programmes, international workshops and the like. Not least, she was a strong pillar in the construction of the European Association for Urban History. When she joined the committee in 1991, it was still an embryonic body. In 1996, she organized the successful and important Budapest conference. When she retired from EAUH in 2004, its conferences were attracting many hundreds of researchers, from across Europe and beyond.

There is no doubt at all that the issue of determinism versus indeterminism was a central, dominating theme of Popper's thought. By his own account he saw his criticism of the thesis of determinism as crucial to his defence not only of the reality of human freedom, moral responsibility and creativity but also as equally fundamental to his account of human rationality and to his theory of the content and growth of science as an objective, rational and most importantly demonstrably rational enterprise. Consequently a great deal of his writings discussing both the content and methodology of the natural and the social sciences alternately bear upon and presuppose his defence of indeterminism.

Sometimes themes exist only in the eye of the beholder and emerge from the history of mathematics only with the benefit (or otherwise) of hindsight. There is however at least one issue (no doubt there are others) which was clearly present throughout the foundational debates of the early Twentieth century. It formed the core component of one of the major traditions that grew up as responses to the paradoxes, though the intuition behind it has never been fully articulated nor has it been possible to give a fully fledged mathematical articulation to that intuition. Essentially the central idea is that of ‘indefinite extensibility’ generated by an appropriate form of diagonalisation and it has its fundamental source in Richard's paradox and in particular in Poincaré's response to that paradox.Of the four great epistemological concerns around which much of the work in the foundations of mathematics this century has concentrated viz the notions of demonstrability, definability, set or class and computability only the latter clearly falls outside the scope of the Richard type reasoning.

The study of British cities and towns has advanced enormously in recent years. Once largely confined to the analysis of the great Victorian Cities—work inspired by the brilliant leadership of the late H. J. Dyos at Leicester—research has now extended to encompass the early and late Middle Ages, the early modern period, and also most recently the twentieth century. Not just metropolitan and industrial centers are being investigated, but the whole spectrum of the urban system: regional capitals, the myriad of market towns, ports, and, beginning in the eighteenth century, the new leisure and service towns. If the old urban studies were largely engineered by historians and sociologists, the new history of British contribution is attracting a galaxy of contributions from archaeologists, cultural geographers, literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, and museologists. Testifying to some of the wealth and diversity is the recent Cambridge Urban History of Britain (edited by D. Palliser et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which in three volumes and with 80 or so contributors covers the period from the fourth century to the Second World War.

On May 12-13 1997, at the instigation of the Chief Executive officer of what was the South Australian Department for Education and Children's services a student forum held in Adelaide dealt with many issues surrounding the idea of ecologically sustainable living. It was attended by 250 students from Years 4-12 with participants coming from most parts of the state. At the end of two days of group discussions and guest speakers students presented group responses to the Ministers for Education and Children's Services and for Environment and Natural Resources. Student responses addressed the following questions:What and how should we learn about ecologically sustainable living in school?What do schools need to do to be places that follow the principles of ecologically sustainable living?What could the Department for Education and Children's Services do to support students and schools to achieve ecologically sustainable living practices?

DURING the second quarter of the eighteenth century there were successive waves of public agitation over the spirits trade—in 1726, 1728–9, 1735–8 and again in 1748–51. Opponents of ‘Mother Gin’ and her supporters waged a multi-media propaganda war, through tracts and sermons, broadsides, ballads, satirical verse, petitions, posters and prints (though Hogarth'sGin LaneandBeer Streetcame only as a final, splendid coda to the attack on gin, in 1751). Parliament in this period enacted a series of measures to deal with the problem. The most dramatic and draconian of these was the 1736 Gin Act, whichwas hurried through Parliament in a few weeks and threatened to close down the spirits trade overnight. The Act, with secondary legislation in 1737 and 1738, caused such a landslide of protest and opposition in the capital that it had to be abandoned and later repealed. In this paper I want to concentrate on the 1736 Act, looking at its background and aftermath. As we shall see, the controversy raises important questions not only about the organisation of the drink trade and consumption patterns in the early eighteenth century, but also about the social and political processes of legislation–the activity of interest groups, the attitude of government, and the problems of enforcement.