The following books and authors should be remembered this year for having reached a significant milestone:

• the death this year (5 January, 2009) of Sir Alan Walters (1927-2009) the monetarist economist and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. He is the subject of one of Liberty Fund's Intellectual Portrait Series.
• the quincentennial of the birth of the Swiss reformation theologian John Calvin (1509-1564)
• the quartercentennial of the publication of the English poet and playwright Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)
• the tricentennial of the birth of the French social theorist Abbé de Mably (1709-1785)
• the semiquincentennial of the birth of the English feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
• the semiquincentennial of the publication of the Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the French philosophe Voltaire's Candide (1759)
• the bicentennial of the death of the English radical writer Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
• the bicentennial of the birth of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and the sesquicentennial of the publication of his Origin of Species (1859)
• the sesquicentenial of the birth of the American economist Frank Taussig (1859-1940), and the deaths of the English writer Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) and the French social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
• the sesquicentenial of the publication of the English philosopher and economist J.S. Mill's On Liberty (1859) and the English writer Samuel Smiles' Self-Help (1859)