The idea of this NATO school was born during philosophical discussions
with Dr Brevard on the present and future of NMR during a night walk
under the palm trees in Biskra during a seminar held in this oasis. It
was clear for us that the recent progress in the field of NMR,
especially inverse spectroscopy and the development of MAS, was opening
new perspectives for chemists. We realised also that organometallic and
inorganic chemists were not clearly informed about the potentialities of
all the new methods. NA TO, with its summer schools, was offering a good
opportunity to propose to the chemical community a session where those
problems would be largely developped. This School is then the
prolongation of the two previous ones: Palermo in 1976 on "the less
receptive nuclei" and Stirling in 1982 on "the multinuclear approach to
NMR spectroscopy" . It was divided into two sub-sessions: NMR in the
liquid state and NMR in the solid state. This is reflected in the book
organization. As indicated by the title of this School, we were mainly
concerned with the methodological aspects of multinuclear NMR. If many
examples are given, they appear only as a support for the understanding
of the theory or in explanation of some practical aspects of the
different experiments. Each domain is introduced by a lecture which
presents selected examples.