The same sense of Britain’s lapsed capacity to deliver on the promise of global reach was viewed as a rare opportunity by Scottish and Welsh separatist parties, whose stunning rise to electability between 1961 and 1979 cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader implications of imperial decline. Here, the end of Britain was the avowed political prize, persistently and effectively packaged in the aspirational politics of ‘stopping the world’ so that older nationalities might be retooled for a post-British age. The chapter considers the electoral breakthrough of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party during these years, both of whom won surprise electorial victories respectively at Carmarthen (1966) and Hamilton (1967). Contemporaries were quick to conflate the two events, detecting deeper ruptures in the tumult of Hamilton and Carmarthen. To this day, they mark the onset of ‘devolution’ as a major theme of contemporary British politics, but the connnections to the wider context of global decolonization are poorly understood. This chapter takes seriously the idea that the end of empire was heavily implicated in the rise of separatist political parties in the UK.

Heraclitus’s doctrine of a cosmogonic unity of opposites held together in harmoniēis the topic of “Heraclitus and the Quantum.” Like Anaximander, Heraclitus posits a self-organizing universe in which objects and agents interact to form relational wholes. It is argued that Heraclitus’s ideas anticipate physicist Niels Bohr’s atomic theory of complementarity and the systems thinking of early cyberneticists. Extended from a description of the cosmos to a prescription for living, Heraclitean harmoniē, it is argued, is tantamount to sustainability, and provides a profounder, more durable alternative to some modern prescriptions circulating under the same conceptual umbrella.

Keith Falkner’s invigorating significance for the RCM in the 1960s was no less than Hugh Allen’s had been in the interwar period. Falkner came to the College after a formative time at Cornell University in the United States, whose distinguished music faculty had introduced him to American musicology and early and contemporary musical repertoires. Falkner’s very individual ‘can do’ mindset encouraged him to challenge the RCM Council to raise the money the College needed, while his wide range of personal and musical sympathies made him very approachable to the RCM students. Falkner appreciated the potential of the RCM’s historic collections, while also being aware of the significant benefit of such technological developments as an electronic music studio. Under Falkner, the RCM’s library service was rationalized, and students were encouraged to perform outside the College. Falkner linked the RCM into the Association of European Conservatoires. He increased the range of subjects students could study, to include the guitar and Baroque instruments and the number of brass and woodwind students increased. Falkner took a robust attitude to improving professors’ pay.

Willcocks led by musical example, and his performances with the College orchestra and chorus helped the success of the Centenary appeal and raised the College’s profile. Willcocks was pleased for the College to undertake concerts of repertoire he had little interest in, as long as standards were high, and so early and contemporary performance flourished. The RCM Centenary was vigorously pursued across the College, and its success raised enough money for the new, integrated, library service, new social space and to build the Britten Theatre. The second Gulbenkian Report (1978) increased public awareness of the unfavourable funding of the conservatoires compared with universities. Relations with Whitehall continued to be difficult, but in Willcocks’s time the College was at last funded to pay its teaching staff on the national pay scales for other higher education institutions.