In 1953, Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Half a year later, I attended a course in English at a British university. We were a group of students from various countries, and we met for social evenings once a week. There were discussions and mutual entertainment as well as just getting together. On one of these occasions, I asked a question relating to the literary aspect of the course: ‘What was the reaction in this country when Winston Churchill got the Nobel Prize in Literature?’ There was complete silence. The main teacher was clearly embarrassed and looked at the other teachers, but not a word was uttered. Finally, he turned to me and said: ‘There was evidently no reaction.’ He looked around once more and added: ‘I think they were glad the old chap got something.’ The man referred to as ‘the old chap’ was about 80 years old at the time, a legend in his own lifetime, the receiver of heaps of distinctions including literary prizes.

Everything that has to do with the Nobel Prize – nominations, reports, discussions – is subject to secrecy for 50 years. This is a blessing for us who are in charge of the Prize. The other side of the coin is that, as far as Churchill is concerned, I am now in a position to account for things that have been hidden so far. Let us see what the archives of the Academy can tell us, bearing in mind that one of the interesting aspects of the Prize is its function in cultural communication.

Naturally occurring biological molecules are made of homochiral building blocks. Proteins are composed of L-amino acids (and not D-amino acids); nucleic acids such as DNA have D-ribose sugars (and not L-ribose sugars). It is not clear why nature selected a particular chirality. Selection could have occurred by chance or as a consequence of basic physical chemistry. Possible proposals, including the contribution of the parity violating the weak nuclear force, are discussed together with the mechanisms by which this very small contribution might be amplified. Homochirality of the amino acids has consequences for protein structure. Helices are right handed and beta sheets have a left-hand twist. When incorporated into the tertiary structure of a protein these chiralities limit the topologies of connections between helices and sheets. Polypeptides comprised of D-amino acids can be synthesized chemically and have been shown to adopt stable structures that are the mirror image of the naturally occurring L-amino acid polypeptides. Chirality is important in drug design. Three examples are discussed: penicillin; the CD4 antagonistic peptides; and thalidomide. The absolute hand of a biological structure can only be established by X-ray crystallographic methods using the technique of anomalous scattering.

Museums face what has been called an ethical crisis of illegitimate acquisitions and reluctant restitution. Some claims go far back (like the Elgin Marbles), others are of more recent origin, like those concerning so-called Holocaust Art. Claims often are not purely legal in nature but also have a moral aspect. The government of The Netherlands has chosen, for a policy-oriented approach to deal with claims from the Second World War, a third way of conflict resolution.

The article examines the 1945–1952 period in Turkish history and contrasts it with what has happened since 1989. The initial period is characterized as Turkey's anchoring in the West, whereas the latter is considered a period of detachment of the West. The aim of the article is to understand whether there really has been a sea change in Turkish foreign policy today or whether the basic principles of 1945–1952 still are embedded in policymaking. For that purpose the developments between 1945–1952 are analysed in detail and compared with the policy developments since 1989. The article argues that what we can see is a contextual shift rather than a sea change in Turkey's foreign policy paradigm. Turkey's Western orientation has become much less predictable and vulnerable due to domestic and external developments but its basic Western orientation has remained.

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the meeting between Prospero and Caliban is an allegory of a Renaissance colonial encounter. Although Prospero emphasizes his gift of language to Caliban, he deems him incapable of ‘nurture’ (cultural progress). After the Second World War, the Barbadian novelist Georges Lamming saw in that gift the possibility of a ‘new departure’, which in the following decades was to modify not only Caliban's prospects but most emphatically the European, and specifically, the British cultural scene. I intend to illustrate this transformation through the contribution of postcolonial writers to the metamorphosis of the ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel. The changes are formal, linguistic but also evince a metaphysical cross-culturalism best exemplified, among others, in the fiction of the Guyanese-born, British novelist Wilson Harris.

After the collapse of the communist power block in 1989, capital cities such as Budapest, Prague and Warsaw had the best starting positions for the development of their own distinctive post-socialist variant of the international market economy. Since then, however, smaller cities, such as Wrocław – the fourth largest city in Poland in terms of population – have been more creative in devising economic and cultural initiatives and strategies to position the city in both and Eastern and the Western European landscape in a recognizable fashion. One of the themes by means of which Wrocław presents itself is that of a European multicultural border city. The issue concerns the extent to which the myth of a richly stratified multicultural history does justice to the reality of the city's recent turbulent and violent past.

Symmetry across the midline is present in many animals, together with the left/right asymmetry of several organs, such as the heart in vertebrates. The development of such asymmetries during embryonic development requires first the specification of the midline and then specification of left/right. One model proposes the transfer of molecular asymmetry to the multicellular level. Nodal expression on the left side in mammals and chicks is a key event, and is due to the release of calcium on the left possibly involving an ion pump and the Notch pathway

We examine whether a fundamental change in the core dimension of modern 20th century statehood, the welfare state, has become evident in response to changed exogenous and endogenous challenges. By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches we take stock of social policy development in four advanced welfare states – Austria, Denmark, New Zealand and Switzerland – over the last 30 years. Neither spending patterns nor structural changes support a ‘race to the bottom thesis’, according to which the changed environment of welfare state policies has led to a downward spiral in benefit provision. On the contrary, we show that social spending levels have risen, mainly due to a catch-up of former welfare state laggards. In structural terms, a blurring of welfare regimes can be observed. This twofold process can be described as dual convergence.

Since the end of the 19th century, social scientists, such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber in particular, have been engaged in developing theoretical concepts aimed at providing insight into the economic and socio-cultural significance of the (European) city. These concepts gained in prominence at the end of the 20th century, with the notion of the European city coming under pressure mainly due to the influence of the globalization of economic processes. The viability of the accepted model of the European city is now at stake.

The Postcolonial representation of European culture can alter our (European) perspectives on Western arts. The case of the novel An Equal Music by the Indian writer Vikram Seth is particularly interesting. Although set in Europe (between London, Vienna and Venice) and dealing with European characters, situations, landscapes, and cultural myths, the book offers a peculiarly Postcolonial reading of our classical music. Therefore, by applying Said's contrapuntal analysis to Postcolonial writing, I deal with ‘What the Postcolonial means for us’, taking into account, besides European Literature and Postcolonialism, also the relationship between European music and the Postcolonial sensibility, using Said's and Kundera's essays as keys to Seth's musical and fictional world.

Between 1854 and 1881, the Ottoman Empire went through one of the most critical phases of the history of its relations with European powers. Beginning with the first foreign loan contracted in 1854, this process was initially dominated by a modest level of indebtedness, coupled with sporadic and inconsequential attempts by western powers to impose some control over the viability of the operation. From 1863 on, a second and much more intense phase began, which eventually led to a snowballing effect of accumulated debts. The formal bankruptcy of the Empire in 1875 resulted in the collapse of the entire system in one of the most spectacular financial crashes of the period. It was only six years later, in 1881, that a solution was found in the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration that would control a large portion of state revenues. The new system restored the financial stability of the Empire, but profoundly modified its rapports de force with Europe by imposing on it a form of foreign control that would have been unthinkable only ten or twenty years earlier. While bringing a much-needed stability to the flailing Ottoman financial situation and thus opening the way to economic development, the new system also radically changed the very nature of the process of integration, by introducing an imperialist dimension that had been lacking in the previous decades.

In this paper – given as a lecture at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 2003 – I survey the remarkable renaissance of museums – national and regional, public and private – in Britain in recent years, largely made possible with the financial support of the Heritage Lottery Fund. I look in detail at four non-national museum projects of particular interest: the Horniman Museum in South London, a remarkable and idiosyncratic collection of anthropological, natural history and musical material which has recently been re-housed and redisplayed; secondly, the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery, famous for its 17th- and 18th-century Old Master paintings, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture by Sir John Soane, which has been restored, and modern museum services provided. The third is the New Art Gallery, Walsall, where the Garman Ryan collection of early 20th-century painting and sculpture form the centrepiece of a new building with fine galleries and the forum is the Manchester Art Gallery, where the former City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum have been combined in a single building in which to display the city's rich art collections. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, of which I am Director, is the most important museum of art and archaeology in England outside London and the greatest University Museum in the world. Its astonishingly rich collections are introduced and the transformational plan for the museum is described. In July 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a grant of £15 million and the renovation of the Museum is now underway.

This review aims to present a speculation about mechanisms that shape the brains of humans and other animals into an asymmetrical organization. To this end, I will proceed in two steps: first, I want to recapitulate evidence from various experiments that show that some but not all asymmetries of the avian brain result from a prehatch light stimulation asymmetry. This should make it clear that avian embryos have a genetic predisposition to turn their head to the right. This results in a higher level of prehatch light stimulation of their right eye. The concomitant left–right difference in sensory input alters the brain circuits of the animal for the entire lifespan in a lateralized way. In the second part of the paper I will present evidence that some of the asymmetries of the human brain take a similar ontogenetic path as those observed in birds. This review provides the evidence that critical ontogenetic processes discovered in animal models could also be involved in the ontogeny of human cerebral asymmetries.

This article focuses on two major questions concerning the changing role of the state in the healthcare systems of OECD countries. First, we ask whether major changes in the level of state involvement (in healthcare systems) have occurred in the past 30 years. Given the fact that three types of healthcare system, each of which is characterized by a distinct role of the state, evolved during the ‘Golden Age’, we discuss how this distinctiveness – or more technically, variance – has changed in the period under scrutiny. While many authors analysing health policy changes exclusively concentrate on finance and expenditure data, we simultaneously consider financing, service provision and regulation. As far as financing is concerned, we observe a small shift from the public to the private sphere, with a tendency towards convergence in this dimension. The few data available on service provision, in contrast, show neither signs of retreat of the state nor of convergence. In the regulatory dimension – which we analyse by focusing on major health system reforms in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States – we see the introduction or strengthening of those coordination mechanisms (hierarchy, markets and self-regulation) which were traditionally weak in the respective type of healthcare system. Putting these findings together we find a tendency of convergence from distinct types towards mixed types of healthcare systems.

What is the state of the state? The members of the national Research Centre Transformations of the State (TranState) at the University of Bremen use the contrast with the OECD nation-state during its ‘Golden Age’ in the 1960s and early '70s to study the rapidly changing interface between international and domestic politics, and between public and private governance. Studies currently underway at TranState confront the changes in the tightly woven fabric of the twentieth-century western, multi-functional state, which emerged after World War II with the functional amalgamation at the national level of the Territorial State, the state that assures the Rule of Law, the Democratic State, and the Intervention State. This functional definition is expressed in the acronym TRUDI.

Both TranState research and the contributions to this volume are aligned along TRUDI's four dimensions of statehood: resources (financial, means of force), rule of law, (democratic) legitimacy, and welfare. These dimensions developed over four centuries and merged, during the ‘Golden Age’, in one institution, the nation-state. Since then, however, processes of globalization, denationalization, privatization as well as individualization have initiated a new dynamic. The finely woven national constellation of the Golden Age state is coming apart – it is unravelling. Yet though an era of structural uncertainty is ahead, not everything is in flux. We may see structured asymmetric change in the make-up of the state, with divergent transformations in each of its four dimensions. TranState aims at accounting empirically for these transformations since the mid-1970s; explaining them and their dynamics; and, finally, determining how these transformations affect the provision of public goods such as security, the rule of law, democratic legitimacy, or welfare provision.

Structural and functional asymmetry in the human brain and nervous system is reviewed in a historical perspective, focusing on the pioneering work of Broca, Wernicke, Sperry, and Geschwind. Structural and functional asymmetry is exemplified from work done in our laboratory on auditory laterality using an empirical procedure called dichotic listening. This also involves different ways of validating the dichotic listening procedure against both invasive and non-invasive techniques, including PET and fMRI blood flow recordings. A major argument is that the human brain shows a substantial interaction between structurally, or ‘bottom-up’ asymmetry and cognitively, or ‘top-down’ modulation, through a focus of attention to the right or left side in auditory space. These results open up a more dynamic and interactive view of functional brain asymmetry than the traditional static view that the brain is lateralized, or asymmetric, only for specific stimuli and stimulus properties.

There is probably no other country like Turkey whose inhabitants succumbed so thoroughly to state interventions as to how to cover or uncover their heads and hair. Suppression and enforced alterations characterize the last two centuries. The headscarf has become an important topic for the Turkish press since the 1950s. Today, the headscarf plays a major role in the discussion about the ‘maturity’ of Turkey to become a member of the European Union.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren is often referred to as one of the last colonial museums in the world. This article provides an overview of the various steps taken in the fundamental transformation process and the plan for renovation of the museum with a view to making it a modern and dynamic Africa museum. For this institution, which is simultaneously a Museum, Research Institute, and Centre of Information Dissemination, a mere change of décor is not sufficient: a fundamental shift in vision, a series of risks, and especially a move towards dialogue and transparency have been part of the process, which has implications that extend far beyond the walls of the museum.

The devastation of the historical cities of the former Yugoslavia, perpetrated by the contending parties in the civil war, was regarded in Western Europe as an act of destruction against European cities. However, the cultural rhetoric of the European identity of cities, such as Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, and Vukovar displays a stark contrast with the European Union's lack of political engagement with the future of Bosnia and Croatia. This rhetoric is also diametrically opposed to the collective politics of exclusion of Bosnian and Croatian migrants from a United Europe. These ambiguous approaches to the notion of ‘Europe’ prompt an analytical focus on the concrete, localized and at times contradictory urban sites where Europeanization is taking place.

The central question in this paper is the relationship between European modernist traveller's self-fashioning and the representation of Sub-Saharan African cultures, spaces and cross-cultural encounters in the early 20th century. The premise is that the cultural production of identity, including the question of artistic identity and poetics, is most productive where it is most ambivalent and uneasy. High modernist critical narratives pose the question of the phenomenology of travel in terms of textual authority. Authority, in the perception in late colonial European writing, was often simultaneously questioned and affirmed, meaning that Western art, and the modern society, were seen as lacking something significant outside of its margin. At the same time, the idea of the pure exotic emerged as incompatible with modern historical consciousness, and colonial texts anticipate many later theoretical ideas in postcolonial studies. The question is how to portray cross-cultural encounters, and how to fashion the self in the contact zone of travel and sojourn. Modernist travel writing asks what was the writer's self and the recognition of identity and difference in others. The modernist image of Africa carries important implications for the re-evaluation of art and literature and the renewal of artistic or narrative forms.