New Zealand's best writers trace the 'shape of the year' -- 1984. An antidote to big, bland generalisations about the eighties', this issue offers idiosyncratic snapshots, detailed histories and bold arguments about a year when, as Murray Edmond puts it in the lead essay, 'an identity crisis, psychological, cultural, social and economic, on a national scale, was fully in evidence'. Edmond draws union politics, radical theatre and the 'Mervyn Thompson affair' into his rich account of 'The Terror and the Pity of 1984'. Tim Borballis wonders what we have overlooked in Orwell's out-of-date, but up-to-the-minute novel, '1984' Tim Wilson, Greg O'Brien, Annie Goldson and Megan Dunn offer vivid thumbnail memoirs of their '84s. And Geoff Heath reveals the ghoulishness behind the era's gloss, in a colour portfolio of new photographs.