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Some twenty years ago, however, the realisation came that the economy of the animal body calls for the activities of substances with functions apparently akin, in many respects at least, to those of the hormones, which the body itself is nevertheless unable to produce, and therefore must receive them in its food. The indispensable functions of these, like those of the hormones, are adequately fulfilled by extraordinarily small amounts of each one. These food constituents yield therefore no appreciable supply of energy, nor do they serve in any ordinary sense as structural materials. Their presence like that of the hormones is necessary rather for the normal progress of active events. They have dynamic functions. I am alluding, of course, to the vitamins.

This article is a shortened version of a Master’s dissertation for the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies. It deals with issues of appraisal. Such issues involve fundamental concepts on what records are, why they are kept, and their life cycle. The answers to these questions were sought and found in the history of archives, and in the specialist literature. The theory and the methodology adopted were then applied to a case study of a recently established organisation in Lisbon, which has, at the core of its business, information in electronic format.

The large, all‐purpose local authorities established by the Local Government Re‐organization Act, 1972, for England and Wales—Scottish local government re‐organization is yet to be completed—are operative; members have long since been elected and organization and staffing, if not complete, at least ready to commence. It is certainly the greatest upheaval since urban and rural sanitary authorities were set up about the middle of the last century. The last change of any magnitude was in 1934; small, however, compared with 1974. At that time, there were 62 county councils, 83 county boroughs and nearly 300 municipal boroughs, 29 metropolitan boroughs, more than 600 urban and about 500 rural districts; roughly 1,600 local authorities. The tremendous reduction in authorities by the present re‐organization illustrates the extent of the upheaval.

The enormous changes of recent years in the food and drink processed and marketed for our consumption has made certain that the law of the sale of food and drugs, despite its history of a hundred years, will not remain static. One would think that everything that could be interpreted and defined had been so long ago, but the law is dynamic; it is growing all the time. The statutes, at the time of their coming into operation, seem to provide for almost every contingency, yet in a few years, the Courts have modified their effect, giving to clauses new meaning, and even making new law of them. It has always been so. The High Court of Justice not only interprets the law, but from time immemorial, Her Majesty's judges have been making law. Long before Parliament became a statute‐making body, with the legal capacity to “change a man into a woman,” and the supreme court of the land, judges were making the law—the Common Law of England, which settlers during the centuries have taken to the four quarters of the world, where it has invariably grown lustily. Decisions of the Supreme Courts of these newer countries, are accepted as case law here and legal principles evolved from them have returned to enrich the law of the old country.

In recent decades, it is possible to point to a new and evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture, focused on the implications of feminism’s changing relations to institutions of state power and law in the United States. According to these analysts, to whom we refer as the critics of feminism in power, the alliances formed between some feminists and neoliberal and conservative elites, coupled with the installation of feminist ideas in law and state institutions problematize the once commonly held assumption, shared by second-wave feminists, that all women, regardless of differences in social location, face certain kinds of exclusions. With women entering formal positions of power from states to NGOs to corporations, this assumption cannot stand. Critical analysts of feminists in power insist that we consider the implications of advancing a feminist politics not from the margins of society but from within the precincts of power. They shine a light on a change in feminism’s relation to institutions of state power and law as reflected in new political alliances forming between feminists and neoliberal and conservative elites, and the political and discursive uses to which feminist ideas and ideals have been put. Building on work on inequalities and hierarchies among women, these critics take up specifically political questions concerning the kind of feminist politics to be promoted in today’s changed gendered landscape. Perhaps most notably, they make explicit a concern shared by radical political movements more generally: what does it mean when the ideas of those who were once considered political outsiders become institutionalized within core sites of state power and law? At the same time, the very broad-brush narratives concerning the cooptation of feminism by neoliberalism put forth by some of these analysts could be complemented with historical and empirical research on specific instances of feminism’s reciprocal, though still unequal, relationship with neoliberalism and state power.

The long interval between the last abortive attempt to negotiate entry to the European Economic Community and the present time, when, if we read the signs aright, the atmosphere is more favourable, seems to have been a period of reflection for great numbers of people. Nothing has changed politically; “getting into Europe” is the official policy of both Government and Opposition, but many of the so‐called Marketeers are now ready to admit to there being problems. What has emerged, however, in the last year or two is that to the British people, the Common Market is not a political question; there are probably as many against it in both camps; big business remains for it, but the spate of letters in the correspondence columns of newspapers from people who, having had time to think, expressing misgivings, cannot have escaped observation by the policy‐makers. A few politicians confess to having second thoughts, mainly from concern at the price the British public may be called upon to pay.

The British catering industry has its roots in the hospices and inns of very early times which provided food and shelter for the traveller. Much later, in the industrial era, when it became necessary to control the sale of intoxicating liquors, a dichotomy separated the industry into drinking and associated entertainments—the licensed or public house—and the eating houses. The latter have always provided for those whose circumstances and occupation force them to “eat out”. The influence of food rationing in the two wars was important and they have grown tremendously in recent years with the vast numbers of people who now travel long distances to work.