Honourable Exception Research Articles

City Tour London

From time immemorial, London’s myriad visitors have been drawn to the traditional sights and attractions of the West End. But increasingly, discerning tourists are looking East. The author of London, More by Fortune than Design encourages exploration beyond the Tower of London by a variety of transport modes: on foot and by bicycle, bus, riverboat, underground, light and heavy rail. Each trajectory illustrates different aspects of the radical change occurring in a sector of the city that, with the honourable exception of Karl Baedeker, was formerly omitted from tourist guidebooks.

The Editor takes a closer look at some of this month's articles

The Editor takes a closer look at some of this month's articles

Notes on Arrian’s preface to the Anabasis

Arrian’s preface to the Anabasis is ‘an honourable exception’ in the ancient historiography, since in the first few lines of his history of Alexander, the Nicomedian historian openly gives his sources and reveals his methods of his source-criticism for the reader. Nevertheless, the opening of the Anabasis is noteworthy not only because it is an honourable exception, but it provides for modern readers some important information about the nature of ancient historiography. It points out how historiographical traditions might have influenced the historian’s approach while he was selecting his sources.

Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion by Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield

no6 Reviews and noting how all of these issues are germane to recent critical work in the areas of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, disability, the status of indigenous peoples, and postcolonial politics and aesthetics.What isalso obvious from thevarious chap ters in this book is the enormous interest that students, from those doing evening classes through undergraduates to advanced postgraduates, also have in life writing. The contributors, who teach and research inAmerica, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, and South Africa and in differing academic environments, outline their responses to thevarious challenges posed by both the structures of the institutions inwhich theywork and the experiences and expectations of the student bodies with which they engage. They show a high level of theoretical awareness of work in the field, and a very impressive teasing-out of different pedagogical approaches within the different courses taught. The purpose of the collection, its editors state, is twofold: to suggest the range and creativity of lifewriting worked on in various departments and programmes throughout theworld, and to share the experiences of their contributors as sources of encouragement for new and veteran instructors of lifewriting. On the second count, they succeed admirably. I cannot imagine how anyone involved in any di mension of lifewriting, in either a theoretical or pedagogical sense, could fail to find something of interest, and even some inspiration, in thisvolume. On the first count, despite theirbroad range, they are perhaps a little less successful.We do not see examples here from teachers in all corners of theworld (Europe isnot accorded much space), and where non-English-language texts are considered as core literary works, most of them are taught in translation intoEnglish (French isan honourable exception, in part because of the significance of the critical writings of Philippe Lejeune and Roland Barthes). There is, for instance, only one Italian work of fiction mentioned (Anna Banti's Artemisia, studied as a mixed-genre text in a graduate seminar on lifewriting taught at Cornell byMiriam Fuchs). This raises the issue of the effectsof translation, and of teaching works in translation. The impact of this process in terms of both stylistic analysis and cultural context is not much men tioned, and this seems odd in a volume that isotherwise highly attuned to contexts of culture and race. This is a significant issue for those of us teaching texts in lan guages other than English (and often under pressure to teach these texts to larger audiences through translation). Apart from these issues, this book is an invalu able pedagogical and theoretical resource; to this end, the extensive bibliography provided by the contributors and supplemented by the editors is truly impressive. University College Dublin Ursula J.Fanning EarlyModern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Ed. byGarrett A. Sullivan, Jr,Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. xiii+338 pp. ?23.99. ISBN 978-0-19-515386-6. This collection of twenty-seven essays represents a masterclass in critical writing intended forgraduate and undergraduate teaching. There are two scene-setting dis cussions, Wendy Wall on what it meant to be an earlymodern author, and Roslyn MLR, 104.4, 2009 1107 L. Knutson on what itwas like to be a player. Four essays are allocated to each of Marlow, Shakespeare, and Jonson, leaving thirteen to cover the rest,who aremany: not onlyWebster, Middleton, Fletcher, and Ford, but also Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres (dated to 1491 (p. 23) and 1497 (p. 12)) and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy ofMariam (1613). The chapter titles take the form 'X and Y': 'Death and The Revengers Tragedy (Michael Neill), or 'The Island Princess and Race' (Clare Jowitt).This might become rigid, but in practice each essay skilfullymakes its topic complex, usually by ar guing historically from earlymodern understanding of the chosen terms. Students will soon be immersed in, say,what Erasmus said but also?less expectedly? inMary Frith's lively interventions into theatrical space, or the complexities of seventeenth-century ideas about race. A second strategy is to break down likely student preconceptions. For example, Kristen Poole writes that 'there is really not such a thing as "Elizabethan religious thought'" (p. 102). The idea of...

Two Anglo-Norman inedita from MS Douce d.6

MS Douce d.6 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (SC 21983), is well known on account of its inclusion of two Tristan poems, namely, the romance by Thomas (ff. 1r-12v) and the episode associated with it, the Folie Tristan (ff. 12vb-19ra). It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the complete contents of the manuscript, which comprises twentytwo vellum folios, have scarcely ever been described by editors of the Tristan poems, including even Joseph Bédier. The honourable exception remains the admirable and indefatigable Francisque Michel, in his three-volume study of the early Tristan poems published in London and Paris over 180 years ago, wherehe printed the opening and concluding lines of the two texts that we edit below. The MS contains five texts in all: Thomas’s Tristan, the Folie Tristan, and the debate between Humility and Pride (ff. 19ra-20ra) — all written by the same scribe soon after the middle of the thirteenth century. The prose version of the legend of the Holy Rood, or “Seth” (ff. 20v-21v), was added by another hand later, probably in the last quarter of the century. Finally (ff. 21v-22r), and in the same hand, there is a Latin prose passage on the composition of the Holy Rood, beginning “Crux Christi conficiebatur ex quatuor lignis” and concluding “unde versus: Pes cedrus stipesque cipressus olivaque summum / Palmaque transversum retinet Christi crude lignum.”

Five Operas and a Symphony: Words and Music in Russian Culture. By Boris Gasparov. pp. xxii + 268. Russian Literature and Throught. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005, 30. ISBN 0-300-10650-5.)

Between 1863 and 1890, Russian literature and music appear to evolve along very disparate lines. A side-by-side chronology of major works sees Chernyshevsky’s polemical What Is to Be Done, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment belonging to the same decade (the 1860s) as Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest, Borodin’s Prince Igor (both operas left incomplete at the composers’ deaths), and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. This pattern continues into the 1870s and 1880s, with Dostoevsky’s disturbing novel The Brothers Karamazov sitting incongruously alongside Rimsky-Korsakov’s sparkling early fairy-tale operas, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina (also left incomplete). At first glance, this looks like a clear case of a lack of social engagement on the part of Russian composers, with perhaps Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov (premiere 1874) serving as the sole honourable exception. And it is at this point that Boris Gasparov invites the reader to think again: to look more closely at those operas that are so often consumed uncritically and to see that they, too, are as typical of their epoch as the weighty historical novels whose philosophical message is rather harder to miss.

Ulster and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Ulster and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity E. Brown Ulster and Scotland 1600-2000: History, Language and Identity. Edited by William Kelly and John R. Young. Pp. 189. ISBN 1-85182-808-7. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2004. EUR 50.00. Two tales. Archibald Hamilton, the son of Claud Hamilton of Cochno, Dumbartonshire, rose within the Irish Anglican church in the first half of the seventeenth century. Successively bishop of Killala and archbishop of Cashel, he was driven from the country by the turmoil of the 1641 rising. Initially associated with the exiled Stuart court, he soon affiliated himself with the Prince of Orange, serving as a professor of theology, before moving, finally, to Sweden. In contrast, Robert Blair, who fled Scotland into Ulster to avoid the Five Articles of Perth, planned, but failed to execute, a removal to America in 1634-5, before returning to Scotland when again faced with religious persecution, this time in Ulster. Despite their obvious differences—both in terms of their religious affiliation and the trajectories of their travels—Hamilton and Blair exemplify the travelling spirit that makes the links between Ulster and Scotland so vital a topic of historical research. In this collection of essays, scholars from a wide range of disciplines and temporal periods congregate to confer over the significance of the emotional, familial, cultural, political and linguistic connections between Scotland and its first colony—Ulster. Divided into three substantive sections, as indicated by the subtitle, the book attempts to convey something of the historical and cultural homogeneity of this migrant community. In some cases, the essays are illuminating and successful, notably in the section devoted to migration. The contribution of Steve Murdoch, in whose essay Hamilton appears, illustrates adeptly how the Scots looked east to the Baltic, as well as west to Ulster, when they dreamed of leaving their homeland. The cultural consequences of their migration in such far-flung parts as New England and New Zealand are equally well handled by Kerby Miller and Jock Phillips, while Patrick Fitzgerald offers a useful corrective to the scholarly emphasis upon the Ulster Plantation by highlighting the impact of the years of dearth in 1690s Scotland in buttressing that initial migration with economic refugees fleeing into the more hospitable climes of Ulster. So too is the issue of language reasonably well handled, although Gaelic gets short shrift from many contributors, with Alan Titley's colourful essay on autobiography an honourable exception. Instead many of the authors have chosen to enter the lists in the increasingly polemical debate surrounding Scots and its derivative, Ulster-Scots. David Horsbury, for example, endeavours to tie the use of Scots to a broad national identity in the early modern period, writing of how 'such men ... were regarded as ethnic Scots and not as separate Ulster Scots.' (p. 151). This is contradicted by John Young's evaluation of the evidence of group [End Page 355] depictions in the period, wherein he asserts 'it is clear that a variety of linguistic descriptions was in operation throughout the period; distressed Irish, Irish, Scots-Irish, Scottish nation, Irish Protestants, British Protestants.' (p. 32). However, that contributors feel comfortable to argue within the pages of the book may merely illustrate the catholicity of the volume, as well as the spirited nature of the debate. More problematic, however, is the broken-backed nature of the story that is being told. This is clearest in the section on language, but it is apparent elsewhere also, notably in Graham Walker's reflections on the utility of the Scottish connection in asserting Ulster's British identity. As Michael Montgomery makes plain in an illuminating contribution, the Scots tongue has had an unhappy and irregular relationship with print culture. Although in the sixteenth century it was a language of state, it declined in the face of standard English, at least as a written language, and has only occasionally surfaced since, notably in the late eighteenth century when Burns took pen in hand. That Burns provides a problematic legacy for the language is the central contention of Richard Finlay's contribution. Finlay notes how Burns was at once contaminated by his own skill as a versifier...

War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators

By Hilary Footitt. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004. x+226 pp. Hb £45.00 There are two parallel narratives of the Liberation of France, argues Hilary Footitt, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ version, concentrating on D-Day and the fond embrace of Allied servicemen by French women, symbolizing the gratitude and passivity of the French population, and the French version, highlighting the liberation of France by the French themselves, the Allies confined to walk-on parts. Footitt's project is to bring together these two stories, to construct the liberation as the encounter and co-existence of two very different communities, taking us through a series of case studies and adopting, as she puts it, an ethnographic approach. Some of the cases she selects broadly bear out the received narratives. In Normandy, there was indeed a massive and fast-moving Allied onslaught, leaving the French as bystanders and also victims of Allied bombing and bombardment, lying low or taking to the roads as refugees once again, as in 1940. In the Midi, the Americans arrived late and the French did by and large liberate themselves, whether as Free French or Resistance, and took charge of their own affairs. But the range of Footitt's case studies gives the lie to such simplistic stories and casts much of the liberation of France in a welcome new light. Franco–American relations were not always easy after the first flush of freedom, and indeed the Americans stayed for some considerable time in Cherbourg, Marseille and Reims, all of which are put under the microscope. The massive arrival of troops, equipment and supplies was little short of an invasion, and much damage was done, whether to church towers suspected of hiding German snipers or to whole cities such as Caen. In many ways, such as the recurrence of requisitioning and pillaging, the imposition of curfews and the requirement that firearms be handed over, the flourishing of the black market and clandestine prostitution, the American occupation was little different from that of the Germans. Relations between Americans and French were often difficult: black troops were disliked and accused of rape, drunkenness was rife and Americans were seen either as savage or childlike, resentment built up about continuing shortages while the Americans were well supplied and German POWs were well treated, those working for the Americans demanded rights as workers and went on strike, to the fury of their liberators, and few Americans could communicate in the French language — Colonel Parkman at Marseille being an honourable exception. Above all, there was a gulf between the agenda of the Americans, for whom the Liberation of France was but a link in the chain of the defeat of Hitler's Germany, and the French agenda, which was to reforge national pride and national identity. Footitt has done an admirable job in the French, British and American archives, skilfully woven together a number of stories to illustrate the complexity of the liberation experience, and brought home forcefully that while heroism abounded, the myths on either side need the careful re-examination that she had expertly undertaken.

Promoting Good Practice in Cognitive-Behavioural Psychotherapies

The National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines for anxiety (Panic and Generalized Anxiety Disorder) and depression were finally launched in December 2004, after much delay (see www.nice.org.uk). Given that these were such important documents, it might seem surprising that the launch went almost entirely unnoticed. Why was it surprising? Because the recommendations were ground breaking. CBT was identified as the first line treatment pretty much across the board, with huge resource implications. It is not the business of NICE to comment on resources (or the lack of these). However, it was noted in the anxiety guidelines that CBT should be available promptly from appropriately trained and supervised therapists. In many (if not most) areas, this strongly implies a huge change in emphasis in the delivery of psychological therapies. The (implicit) implications are staggering. With the honourable exception of Interpersonal Therapy in depression, other psychological therapies were not advocated – at all. In anxiety, combination treatment (medication and CBT) was not recommended as a first or second line treatment. Some medication (antipsychotic) was ruled out. Guided self-help (based on CBT principles) was “third choice”. So the explicit recommendation is that good quality, empirically grounded psychotherapies (CBT, CBT and IPT in depression) should be widely and promptly available, whereas therapies without an empirical basis were not recommended.

Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama by Therese Steffen (review)

Robinson, Richard Powers, Emily Prager,and Alison Lurie all springto mind. Not nearly enough work is being done on this strandof contemporarywriting;Varvogli is an honourable exception to the rule. UNIVERSITY OFNOTTINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Crossing Color: Transcultural SpaceandPlacein RitaDove'sPoetry, Fiction,andDrama.By THERESE STEFFEN.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 200I. Xiii + 239 PP. ?26.50. ISBN:0-I9-513440-0. In this much needed firstfull-lengthstudyof Rita Dove's work, Therese Steffenhas done a marvellousjob in respondingto and presentingin a scholarlyway the diversity and creative range of one of America'sforemost contemporaryliterarytalents. As a poet, Dove has become a high-profilename in Americanculturewith a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post,and Steffen's reading is enhanced with reference to the many interviews, readings, and media appearances that Dove has given, particularly during her tenure as Poet Laureate from I993 to I995. The book concludes with a transcriptof Steffen'sown extended interviewwith Dove, a valuable addition to the record. Dove's determination not to be typecast as a black writer, or a black woman writerwas an unusual and individualstand at the time in which she began writing in the I97os. This refusal to be corralledwithin the Black Arts Movement is one of the transculturalcrossings that Steffen explores, arguing that Dove is one of the initiators of the 'trend toward a mainstream pluriculturalnational identity' (p. 9). Her Pulitzerprize-winningpoem, Thomas andBeulah(1987),loosely based on the lives of her grandparents,was notable in expressing how the black migration from the rural south to the industrializednorth in the early years of the twentieth century was bound up in the American Dream, that this historyis part of American history. Dove mainstreamed the narrative without losing anything of its specific human particularity. Perhaps the most significant and surprisingcrossing has been to Europe. Like HenryJames before her, Dove has entered into the complex fate of the Europeanized American. Crossingthe Atlantic, as she frequentlydoes, by ocean liner, it is a passage that has given her, in Steffen's phrase, 'artistic enspacement' (p. 28). Steffen is particularlyinsightfulon the poetry based on Dove's German experience (Dove was a postgraduate student in Germany, and she subsequently married a German writer).The exploration of the affinitieswith Rilke, the 'pluralityof connotations' (p. 94) that groupsof poems with a German topographyaccrue, is excellentlydone. It is indeed notjust Europeanbut internationalground in a more culturallyexpansive , and at times more conflicted, sense thanJames's that Dove's poetry invokes. Her historicaland geographicallocales cross from medieval Siena to Montgomery, Alabama, from Tel Aviv toJerusalem, biblical and modern. Steffen has sought a flexible composite theoretical approach that encompasses Dove's cultural crossings, a combination of European and African-American perspectives.She draws, interalia,on Gaston Bachelard's ThePoetics of Space(trans. by MariaJolas (Boston:Beacon Press, I994)),a text Dove herselfdescribesas imaginatively fruitful in The Poet's World(Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995), and linksthis conceptualfieldwith the linguisticworkof African-Americantheorists Robinson, Richard Powers, Emily Prager,and Alison Lurie all springto mind. Not nearly enough work is being done on this strandof contemporarywriting;Varvogli is an honourable exception to the rule. UNIVERSITY OFNOTTINGHAM JUDIENEWMAN Crossing Color: Transcultural SpaceandPlacein RitaDove'sPoetry, Fiction,andDrama.By THERESE STEFFEN.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 200I. Xiii + 239 PP. ?26.50. ISBN:0-I9-513440-0. In this much needed firstfull-lengthstudyof Rita Dove's work, Therese Steffenhas done a marvellousjob in respondingto and presentingin a scholarlyway the diversity and creative range of one of America'sforemost contemporaryliterarytalents. As a poet, Dove has become a high-profilename in Americanculturewith a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post,and Steffen's reading is enhanced with reference to the many interviews, readings, and media appearances that Dove has given, particularly during her tenure as Poet Laureate from I993 to I995. The book concludes with a transcriptof Steffen'sown extended interviewwith Dove, a valuable addition to the record. Dove's determination not to be typecast as a black writer, or a black woman writerwas an unusual and individualstand at the time in which she began writing in the I97os. This refusal to be corralledwithin the Black Arts Movement is one of the transculturalcrossings that Steffen explores, arguing that...

Editorial

The journal has rarely published articles on Jewish music – one honourable exception being the article by Professor Alfred Fisher on Schoenberg (Autumn 1999). In the current issue we seek to remedy this gap with a preliminary venture into the field. As a non-specialist journal we cast our net quite wide and are particularly grateful to our Poetry Editor Ruth Fainlight for her contacts.

Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (review)

184 Reviews and the schools, the 'both-and' and the 'either/or'. Perhaps the pace and flow of the writing tends to carry us forward against our better judgement. But here the footnotes and references point to hypertextual checks and balances. Not only that, they open up (for m e , at least) new and fascinating leads—from Jane Gallop on Pedagogy to the literature of medieval Castilian. Moreover, such simplification can be excused so long as it does not vitiate the main argument. After all, it was Abelard w h o said, in a passage not quoted by Brown: 'sometimes a writer sacrifices perfect accuracy in the interest of a clear general statement' (Preface, Sic et Non). Sabina Flanagan Department ofHistory University ofMelbourne Brown, Cedric C. and Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (Early M o d e r n Literature in History), Basingstoke, Macmillan and N e w York, St. Martin's Press, 1997; cloth; pp. x, 254. When travelling in foreign parts an accurate map and a decent phrase book can help us to orient ourselves and to ask useful questions, and we can usually see more if w e travel lightly. Several essays in this collection break all these rules and, encumbered by excessive theoretical baggage, bewildered by their limited grasp of the language and disoriented by their ignorance of the landscape, endure a torrid time in the foreign country that was Early Modern England. Their failure is all the more apparent because Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti introduce this eclectic collection of tourists as 'practising the kind of sociological bibliography D. F. Mackenzie has advocated' or the detailed local reading Leah Marcus has encouraged, based furthermore on the historical specificity of archival research, dubbed 'the new erudition'. With the honourable exception of Richard Dutton's essay on 'The Birth of the Author', few of these essays match up to this description, or if they do then historians and literary scholars really are speaking a different language. Dutton shows a subtle awareness of the conflict between the Reviews 185 corporate ethos of theatrical companies and the individualism of gentleman amateur poets, which underlies the contrasting publishing strategies of Shakespeare and Jonson and reveals the latter's novelty in taking pride in his 'laborious' play-writing. To a lesser extent Cedric Brown carefully historicises the versions of Milton's Lycidas, but overall this collection fails to live up to the claims of its editors. Janel Mueller, for example, spends twenty pages detailing her personal struggle with the cumbersome theoretical luggage of gender, class and race before rather shamefacedly falling back on religion to explain the differences between John Fisher and Katherine Parr's usage of the metaphor of 'the Book of the Crucifix'. Marotti lacks proof for his case that the printed accounts of the mission of E d m u n d Campion and Robert Persons assimilated some of the power associated with the martyred Campion's relics, even for Protestants, because he relies on wellread narrative rather than archival analysis, and even that narrative is dated on issues such as Protestant thinking on the Elect Nation. Pamela Neville-Singleton also relies on a largely familiar narrative for her explanation of the 'censorship' of Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, butherdiscovery ofapreviouslyunknown Archbishop ofCanterbury, George Whitgift, raises doubts about precisely which country she is describing. Certainly her weak and simplistic account of the political pressures that conditioned the state of Hakluyt's text does not resemble Elizabethan England, which m a y explain the disjunction between the body of her essay anditsconclusionthat 'reader demand' required the inclusion ofsome matter. Nor, despite her claims to forensicbibliography, does she accurately identify thecopies thatshe claims supporther case. Peter Lindenbaum fares nobetter with his attempt to prove that the declining occurrence of marginalia in the Folger copies of Sidney's Arcadia reflects its transition from a bearer of High Renaissance cultural values into a middle-class novel. Apart from doubts aboutthevalidity ofhis sample the logic ofhisclaim thatpublishers responded tosuch reader demand in reformatting theArcadia seems questionable in the lightofmarketforces, givenSasha Roberts' point (p. 131) thatreader diversity seemed evident to contemporaries. Lori Humphrey N e w c o...

29. Stellar Spectra (Spectres Stellaires)

Over the past 3 years the availability of abstracts, journal's table-of-content, bibliographic searches and even preprints on the Internet means that summaries such as this will be unnecessary. The AAS WWW bibliographical/abstract services (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/aas/) accesses several useful sites: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/aas-search.shtml for bibliographic searches of ApJ, ApJL, ApJS, AJ and PASP from 1988 to the present. The ADS abstract bibliographic service covering in addition A&A, A&AS, MNRAS, PASJ, RMexAyA, PASAus, IrishAJ, BASInd, BalAst and other journals is http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstractjervice.html; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/toc.service.html is for table-of-content queries that are useful for browsing the same journals. Most of these services are also available through the CDS (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/CDS.html) in several different languages. From this site can also be obtained published tables from astronomical journals as well as other data that have been deposited by individuals. The SIMBAD database (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad.html) maintains its importance as a stellar database in particular. It is necessary to have a user account to access SIMBAD. The ApJ contents is now online at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/contents/ApJ. Notable by its absence from these data bases is Nature from whose home page (http://www.nature.com) the TOC of the current year's issues only can be browsed after registering. Preprints can be obtained from http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/astro-ph covering the years 1992 to the present. The various search engines also often turn up papers given at conferences or in other publications than the mainstream astronomical journals. Transition probabilities and term levels are an important area long neglected for the provision of digital data (with the honourable exception of CDROM 18 from R.L.Kurucz). The spectroscopic databases of the NIST (http://aeldata.phys.nist.gov/nist_atomicjpectra.html) now contain extensive data for some elements, in particular the transitional probabilities for the iron group elements. One assumes that the list of elements with gf values will be progressively increased. It is obvious from a perusal of these web sources as well as noting the rapid filling of library shelves, that the number of papers being published in astronomy and astrophysics continues its inexorable increase. This makes it even more difficult to do justice to all the work done over the past 3 years.

A professional opinion?

A part from my neighbour's rampant hedge of Cupressocyparus leylandii (die, you brutes, die, I find myself screaming), writing medicolegal reports is what I detest more than anything else in this world. It must be the closest thing to medical prostitution (with the honourable exception of executive health screens) that we've got. The bottom line, so to speak, is that if you pay us enough we will say whatever you want us to say, in whatever throaty tone you might desire, and how we interpret a medical history will depend not on our objective medical opinion, but rather on who is …

Why Tell This Parable? Some Ethical Reflections on the Dionne Quintuplets

Cultural studies dlscovers Dionne Quintuplets. Inevitable and welcome: what better illustration of power of professional discourses, logic of the gaze, demarcation of normal from pathological? Quintland was Foucauldian theatre par excellence -- and although Michel Foucault is rarely mentioned in these articles, his spectre haunts almost all of them. Rather than merely adding new empirical material to Pierre Berton's 1977 account, these thoughtful articles suggest a new way of telling this story that unsettles all old categories (even that of childhood).Briefly and schematically, has had three moments: an initial naive, heartfelt celebration, fed by their promoters and state, and diffused through newly refined arts of advertising, of miracle of life and cuteness of babies; a second - order liberal humanist, somewhat anti - modern historiography, discernibly echoing politics of 1960s, critical of exploitation of Quints and of excesses of modern science, yet also reclaiming this experience for Canadian culture; and finally, this new skeptical school, turning its cool gaze on all those discourses and technologies of power through which Dionne girls were transformed into the Quints. For these third - generation Dionnologists, crucial task is analysis of categories and disciplines: Quints are reconceptualized as sites, on which were staged manoeuvres of priests and politicians, clinicians and hucksters, doctors and nurses, not to mention rival ideals of class, gender, and ethnicity. And insofar as this new narrative undoubtedly captures much of what was surely case, and does so in most disturbing and interesting fashion, it marks a real advance. And yet...IIAnd yet, I'm left asking myself some simple (some might say simpleminded) questions. Why did this happen? Should it have happened? Why are we retelling this story today? These sound like silly questions because they bring to Dionnology explicitly ethical considerations. Historians are largely trained to treat ethical discussions as embarrassing outbreaks, like acne, to be remedied with clear, refreshing balm of empiricism and common sense; cultural studies is even more hostile to formal ethics, mainly because a theoretical tradition so influenced by Foucault (and consequently by Nietzsche) is bound to question any universal, teleological, or even general framework of ethical reason as a holdover from discredited narratives of humanism.(f.1)Even so, I'm surprised by absence in this particular case of much overt ethical reasoning: it just calls out for it. Not to be confused with a simplistic hunt for heroes and villains (wisely avoided by everyone here), this process of reasoning rather would mean being clear about ethical assumptions that ground research. Yet nobody talks directly about ethics in this issue (with honourable exception of Mariana Valverde, who makes powerful use of deeply ethical concept of tragedy). But isn't it precisely ethical gravity of this case that makes it so compelling? If these girls had merely grown up in northern Ontario, unnoticed and unexploited, or if they had enjoyed pleasantly remunerative careers endorsing soap and cigarettes, sheltered by a middle - class Anglo family and an adoring public, would we now still be talking about them? It's garish juxtaposition of farce and tragedy, Quintland and legalized kidnapping, little people and massive forces, pious liberal rhetoric of rights and squalid liberal realities of property that make us remember Dionnes. The tale of Dionnes seems a parable that speaks to a condition of capitalist postmodernity, sharing as many of us now do a habitus eerily similar to theirs -- one experienced in company of strangers, unfolding in context of cultures (no longer taken - for - granted life - worlds but consciously, painfully contrived, artificial life - styles cobbled together from ruins and wreckage of liberal project), and destined to be remembered, if at all, only in anonymous clinical records of professionals and superiors. …

Indian adult education and the post‐colonial legacy

Under the Raj education concentrated on reproducing a small Anglicized elite capable of administering the country. Adult education was minimal and confined to a few urban centres. After Independence Indian adult education was burdened with the project of modernization as India under Nehru and the nationalist movement desperately tried to industrialize the state according to western and soviet models. Despite the relative success of the first Five Year Plan's literacy programme, levels of funding dropped while bureaucracy and falsification of figures increased. Despite Gandhi, Indian education also suffered from elitist discourses inherited from the British Raj which assumed a ‘trickle‐down’ effect and resulted in the over‐balancing of the system towards higher education. Western experts (with the honourable exception of Frank Laubach) have tended to confirm the bias, but even Laubach's agenda raised suspicion. Only with the coming of the NAEP in 1978 was a serious attempt to redress the balance made. Subs...

Paul Scott's Guardians

'Popular history in a fictionalized form' is the kind of dismissive phrase used about Paul Scott's Raj Quartet by many who have not read the four-novel sequence and by a few who have. So it is not surprising that serious literary critics, with the honourable exception of Patrick Swinden in his recent book on Scott, have paid small heed to this very sizeable work. The aim of the present essay is to suggest that the sequence is very much more than an evocation of the last days of British India; that it aspires to be an imaginative creation of Tolstoyan breadth and depth, and as such demands a serious critical attention. What the rewards of such attention may be are for the most part left here as an open question. Some tentative valuations are attempted, but the important thing is that the enquiry should be seen as one which is worth pursuing, that the Raj Quartet should be understood to have not only size but magnitude as well. A natural place to begin an investigation of Scott's objectives and achievements is his own beginning to the work, the story of Miss Crane: seventy-odd pages which are as powerfully disconcerting as the Dorothea Brooke episode of Middlemarch and to much the same purpose of startling us into a full receptivity of all that is to follow. The story is a kind of narthex in which, like medieval catechumens, we are put wise before we are admitted to the cathedral itself.

Inflation Accounting

Many private individuals in the UK have been brought up by parents who have stressed the disadvantages of being in debt. As a result there are many people in this country who will not consider the purchase of goods unless they can be paid for in cash. Building society mortgage funds are sometimes looked upon as an honourable exception to the general rule, although even in this case there are still many individuals who cannot accept the idea of having a debt of several thousand pounds around their neck for say twenty‐five years. In conditions of inflation, however, these ideas should be questioned by both private individuals and business organisations, although there are many who will still prefer the comfort of a sizeable bank balance which will provide protection in the difficulties that may lie ahead.

Mottes: A Classification

In 1878, General Pitt Rivers excavated the motte and bailey castle on the downs behind Folkestone and published the results with characteristic promptness and accuracy. Today, over three-quarters of a century later, only four excavations, all in the past ten years, have advanced our knowledge further. While these have solved many problems, they have posed others, for few mottes are adequately documented (Old Aberystwyth is an honourable exception) and the dating of results can only be approximate.

The Harveian Oration

The Harveian Oration