  The nucleus is one of the most multi-faceted many-body systems in the
universe. It exhibits a multitude of responses depending on the way one
'probes' it. With increasing technical advancements of beams at the various
accelerators and of detection systems the nucleus has, over and over again,
surprised us by expressing always new ways of 'organized' structures and layers
of complexity. Nuclear magnetism is one of those fascinating faces of the
atomic nucleus we discuss in the present review. We shall not just limit
ourselves to presenting the by now very large data set that has been obtained
in the last two decades using various probes, electromagnetic and hadronic
alike and that presents ample evidence for a low-lying orbital scissors mode
around 3 MeV, albeit fragmented over an energy interval of the order of 1.5
MeV, and higher-lying spin-flip strength in the energy region 5 - 9 MeV in
deformed nuclei, nor to the presently discovered evidence for low-lying
proton-neutron isovector quadrupole excitations in spherical nuclei. To the
contrary, we put the experimental evidence in the perspectives of understanding
the atomic nucleus and its various structures of well-organized modes of motion
and thus enlarge our discussion to more general fermion and bosonic many-body
systems.
