Standard Edition Research Articles

Abstract 55: Disruption of PCSK9 Using a Targeted Base Editing Strategy

Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) increases blood low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol by acting as an LDL receptor antagonist, thereby impairing LDL particle clearance. Since genetic disruption of PCSK9 is linked to reduced risk of coronary heart disease (CHD), our recent work has sought to permanently knock out the gene by using new genome editing technology. Recently reported “base editors” introduce point mutations at specific locations in the genome without the need for DNA double-strand breaks and, thus, with a lowered incidence of off-target effects. These base editors build on the CRISPR-Cas9 system by tethering an RNA-editing domain to a nickase version of Cas9, allowing for specific CT and/or GA base alterations. In this study, we used the “BE3” base editor (which uses the APOBEC-1 RNA-editing domain) to specifically target codons encoding tryptophans (TGG) or glutamines (CAG or CAA) to introduce nonsense mutations (producing stop codons TAG, TGA, or TAA) into human PCSK9 . The number of testable targets was increased by introducing specific point mutations into the BE3 construct (D1135V, R1335Q, T1337R in the Cas9 portion of BE3) to alter the protospacer adjacent motif (PAM) from NGG to NGA. Using HEK293 cells, we individually targeted a number of codons spanning the first seven exons in PCSK9 and identified several efficient targets. Most notably, the codons encoding glutamine 278 and glutamine 302 could be altered to stop codons in ~50% of alleles, as determined by the CEL-I nuclease mismatch assay and Sanger sequencing. We then targeted glutamine 278 in human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and demonstrated base editing to introduce nonsense mutations into PCSK9 , albeit at a lower efficiency than in HEK293 cells. As a next step towards translation to human patients, we are targeting Pcsk9 in the mouse liver in vivo with BE3. Base editing may prove to be an efficient, safer strategy than standard CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing and holds promise as a strategy for the prevention of CHD.

米国における「教育上のリーダーの専門職基準」2015年版の分析 改訂プロセスと内容を中心として

米国における「教育上のリーダーの専門職基準」2015年版の分析 改訂プロセスと内容を中心として

Developing the Program Evaluation Utility Standards: Scholarly Foundations and Collaborative Processes

Abstract: Developing the third edition of the program evaluation utility standards required multilevel collaborations among task force members, members of the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, sponsoring organizations, and hundreds of involved stakeholders. The scholarship on evaluation use, influence, and collaboration was foundational for the utility standards and materials accompanying them and equally important for informing the processes guiding utility standards development. This article emphasizes the foundational role of this recent scholarship and the roles played by all who collaborated in planning and implementing the utility standards development processes.

Расчет переходных восстанавливающихся напряжений при выборе выключателей для электроустановок напряжением 110 кВ и выше

In clearing short-circuit faults, a transient recovery voltage (TRV) arises between the circuit breaker contacts, which may initiate repeated ignition of electric arc. For modern circuit breakers, including SF6 and vacuum ones, the maximum permissible TRV peak and rate of rise values are given in the GOST(State Standard) R 52565-2006. Earlier editions of the relevant standards contained the requirements only for air blast and oil circuit breakers. The use of modern electrical installations with circuit breakers selected without paying proper attention to TRV may lead to accidents with severe consequences. The article presents a theoretical and calculated comparison of the regulatory documents applicable to circuit breakers for rated voltages of 110 kV and higher and contains recommendations on calculating the TRV parameters that can be used as reference ones in checking the breaking capacity of high-voltage circuit breakers. Methods for calculating the parameters of TRVs with exponential, single-frequency and sawtooth waveforms are considered and compared with one another. Examples of calculating transients involving different TRV waveforms are given. The necessity of calculating TRV with a sawtooth waveform for SF6 and vacuum circuit breakers is pointed out. For updating the design conditions under which the maximum TRV rate of rise and peak values may occur, it is recommended to continue the study. In particular, it is advisable to determine the critical remoteness of a short circuit fault on the line side determined by the combined effect of power line parameters and short-circuit current values on the TRV.

Spinoza's Acquiescentia

Spinoza's account of acquiescentia has been obscured by inconsistent translations of acquiescentia , and forms of the verb acquiescere , in the standard English edition of the Ethics . For Spinoza, acquiescentia is an inherently cognitive affect, since it involves an idea of oneself (as the cause of one's joy). As such, the affect is closely correlated to the three kinds of cognition identified by Spinoza in Ethics II. Just as there are three kinds of cognition, so too are there three kinds of acquiescentia . Two qualities—stillness and obedience—provide the criteria for distinguishing between these. This illuminates Spinoza's positive account of acquiescentia , and also clarifies how it responds critically to the equivalent Cartesian passion, la satisfaction de soimeme , which is translated as acquiescentia in se ipso in the relevant Latin edition of Les passions de l'âme .

Knowledge Representation Model for Crime Analysis

The knowledge representation model is a particular way in representing knowledge by using the knowledge and reasoning mechanism. Ontology is a kind of knowledge representation model that represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationship between these concepts. It is important to solve the problem of large amount of data in the crime investigation domain which is not well defined in a proper relation. The problems exist currently are how to develop an ontology model to represent the crime investigation information and how to make good use of the information represented by the model. These problems could be solved by developing an ontological-based case matching model, named CrimeAnalysis as a study prototype. In this study, an ontology model is developed using the selected semantic modelling tool, named TopBraid Composer Standard Edition in order to represent the crime information with the well-defined classes and relationships. This would help to save the investigation officer’s effort in aiming and targeting the possible suspect within the shortest time interval.

Damasus of Rome, The Epigraphic Poetry: Introduction, Texts, Translations, and Commentary by Dennis Trout

Reviewed by: Damasus of Rome, The Epigraphic Poetry: Introduction, Texts, Translations, and Commentary by Dennis Trout Kristina Sessa Dennis Trout Damasus of Rome, The Epigraphic Poetry: Introduction, Texts, Translations, and Commentary Oxford Early Christian Texts Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 Pp. 229. $155.00. The popes of late antique Rome are known for many things. They delivered stentorian proclamations of episcopal authority; they built and beautified many of the city’s churches; they fought in disputed episcopal elections and hounded heretics; they even (allegedly) confronted Attila the Hun. Poetry writing, alas, does not typically make the list. Dennis Trout’s welcomed new volume, Damasus of Rome, The Epigraphic Poetry, will help correct these assumptions. As Trout shows, at least one Roman bishop, Damasus (366–384 c.e.), dedicated substantial resources and personal time to the art of poetic composition. Among other contributions, the book presents the first complete set of English translations of all sixty-seven extant Latin poems, which the bishop composed during his tenure and in most cases commissioned the renowned calligrapher Philocalus to inscribe with his unique lettering on marble slabs. The majority of Damasus’s verse inscriptions commemorate the city’s martyrs, whose cult spaces outside Rome’s walls were also a subject of interest for the bishop. Damasus is attributed with extensive renovations of these martyr shrines, and we know that he ordered his own inscribed poems—a number of which feature the bishop’s signature—to adorn the walls. The volume also spotlights Damasus’s work as a poet, underlining his innovations on forms and techniques that were popular in the fourth century, such as the heavy use of Virgilian allusion. Indeed, what distinguishes Damasus of Rome from other studies on his poetic corpus is the fact that Trout carefully situates the poetry within multiple contexts: the literary, the archaeo-logical, and the historical. In addition to bringing Damasus’s full poetic corpus to English-speaking audiences for the first time, Trout offers readers a highly readable synthesis of recent scholarship on the bishop, his literary endeavors, and the broader ecclesiastical milieu. [End Page 165] The volume opens with a detailed introduction to Damasus and the poems (discussed further below). This is followed by a “reader’s guide” to key late ancient and medieval primary sources that Trout and others use to supplement the study of the Damasan epigrams. The remainder of the volume is dedicated to the full Latin text and English translation of all Damasus’s extant poems, including several highly fragmentary verses and the few non-epigraphic. Each poem is accompanied by detailed commentary: first a line-by-line discussion of key phrases, intertextual allusions, and relevant text critical information; second, a more general discussion of the poem, its original material and historical contexts, and its afterlife as either an extant inscription (typically fragmentary and often moved elsewhere) or a textual transcription (in manuscripts known as syllogae). The Latin text largely follows the still standard edition produced by Antonio Ferrua in 1942, with emendations offered only on issues brought to light by new evidence. Trout’s new English translations are lively but adhere closely to Latin; they will undoubtedly make their way quickly into teaching syllabi. The volume concludes with several indices, including a linguistic index on important Latin expressions. The interdisciplinary nature of Damasus of Rome is arguably the book’s greatest strength. The lengthy introduction to the author and poems covers virtually every conceivable angle on the material with varying levels of detail. Trout gives due attention to Damasus’s larger martyr project and to the fractious ecclesiastical context in which he became bishop and composed the poems. He introduces readers to Philocalus and his elegant serif-accented script, and to the fascinating transmission history of the poems, many of which were copied into manuscripts by visiting pilgrims. And in a move that will please classicists, Trout addresses many technical features of Damasus’s poems, discussing at length matters such as metrical quantity (and the extent to which Damasus followed convention), Damasus’s use of caesuras and diaeresis, and his deliberate alteration between verbal repetition and innovation. Trout also enters the debate over Damasus’s alleged authorship of the...

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy

Beyond Diels-Kranz: The New Loeb Early Greek Philosophy JOHN PALMER The publication of a Loeb Classical Library edition of the evidence for early Greek philosophy is a major event in classical scholarship.* In these nine volumes, running to well over 4,000 pages, André Laks and Glenn Most undertake to present in an accessible format the principal evidence for the Greek philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. They have been assisted in this massive project by Gérard Journée, Leopoldo Iribarren, and David Lévystone, who receive special credit on the title page; by several scholars who have provided special assistance in the preparation and translation of texts in Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and Hebrew; and by numerous others who have provided comments on individual chapters or who have been consulted on particular points. The editors and their assistants are to be commended for their exemplary execution of such a vast and difficult task. They have succeeded in producing what is far and away the best available edition of the texts of the early Greek philosophers with accompanying English translation. (With the simultaneous publication of Les débuts de la philosophie: Des premiers penseurs grecs à Socrate [Paris: Éditions Fayard, 2016], they have also produced the best edition with accompanying French translation.) More than that, their edition effectively supersedes Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, which has long held sway as the standard edition of the Presocratics, *André Laks and Glenn W. Most (eds. and trans.), Early Greek Philosophy. 9 volumes. Loeb Classical Library 524–32. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. arion 25.3 winter 2018 but it only does so because Laks and Most have respectfully taken Diels-Kranz as their model. The collection is not without its flaws, some of which will be addressed here, but these are mostly negligible in comparison with its innumerable merits. Laks and Most have set such a high standard with this work that it is hard to imagine that we will see a better general collection on early Greek philosophy in our lifetimes. Laks and Most generally avoid referring to their subject as “Presocratic” philosophy. The term “Vorsokratiker,” first employed in Johann August Eberhard’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (Halle, 1788), was eventually used by Hermann Diels to demarcate, not a chronological period of philosophy prior to Socrates, but that constellation of early thinkers whose mode of philosophical activity was not influenced by Socrates and the changes he wrought to philosophy’s self-conception. “Presocratic” philosophy for Diels was thus roughly equivalent to the phase of ancient philosophy prior to the rise of the philosophical schools. Nonetheless, the term is awkward and has unwelcome temporal and historiographic connotations, rightly noted by Laks and Most. Not all the figures in these volumes were active before Socrates, nor is it historically accurate to contrast them all with a “Socratic” approach to philosophy, despite Cicero’s famously influential characterization of Socrates as having brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth (Cic. Tusc. V 4.10–11). Laks has very usefully discussed both the ancient antecedents and modern deployment of the notion of “Presocratic” philosophy in his Introduction à la “philosophie présocratique” (Paris 2006), now translated by Glenn Most as The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy (Princeton 2018). Laks’s conclusion there that the common history of the transmission and survival of their writings is one of the least contestable criteria of an otherwise problematic identity serves as background to the editors ’ characterization of the object of the present volumes as the philosophers prior to Plato “who are transmitted in the form of fragments” (vol. i, p. 7). The collection’s entire first volume is devoted to introduc188 beyond diels-kranz tory and reference materials. Included are a preface explaining the organizational and editorial principles governing the presentation; a list of abbreviations; a more general bibliography than the ones provided in the introductions to individual chapters; a two-way concordance between Laks and Most’s set of textual identifiers and those employed in DielsKranz ; a useful index of references in the collection to the early Greek philosophers outside the chapters devoted to them, followed by a more...

Review: The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church: Books, Music and Ritual in Mainz, 950–1050, by Henry Parkes

The Making of Liturgy in the Ottonian Church: Books, Music and Ritual in Mainz, 950–1050 , by Henry Parkes. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., 100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xvi, 259 pp. The “prince of liturgists,” Edmund Bishop (1846–1917), likened historians who busy themselves with “external criticism,” the verification of what primary sources can be made to say and what they cannot, to an army of “burrowing earth-worms”: > [I]t is well to remember that by their quiet, steady, persevering, and in the long run unerring labour, they have undermined more than one stately looking edifice which there can now be no question of shoring up or buttressing any more. Down it has, or inevitably must, come.1 Henry Parkes is less an earthworm than a blasting engineer, and the edifice he has demolished has been, until now, an axiomatically accepted datum of modern liturgical scholarship, the so-called Pontifical romano-germanique ( PRG ). Standard textbooks on the medieval liturgy (e.g., Vogel's Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources and Palazzo's A History of Liturgical Books ) tell the story of the PRG and its reconstruction from some forty surviving manuscripts by Michel Andrieu.2 According to Andrieu, the PRG was created at Mainz in the middle of the tenth century as a “standard edition” of the bishop's liturgical book, complete with a guide to ordering the entire ecclesiastical year,3 in an attempt to unify liturgy under the Ottonians. Parkes has shown elsewhere that the PRG , as represented in its classic edition, never actually existed: the same texts are indeed encountered in some forty manuscripts, but seldom all together and often with significant alterations.4 In …

Direct Visual Editing of Node Attributes in Graphs

There are many expressive visualization techniques for analyzing graphs. Yet, there is only little research on how existing visual representations can be employed to support data editing. An increasingly relevant task when working with graphs is the editing of node attributes. We propose an integrated visualize-and-edit approach to editing attribute values via direct interaction with the visual representation. The visualize part is based on node-link diagrams paired with attribute-dependent layouts. The edit part is as easy as moving nodes via drag-and-drop gestures. We present dedicated interaction techniques for editing quantitative as well as qualitative attribute data values. The benefit of our novel integrated approach is that one can directly edit the data while the visualization constantly provides feedback on the implications of the data modifications. Preliminary user feedback indicates that our integrated approach can be a useful complement to standard non-visual editing via external tools.

Bounded Repairability for Regular Tree Languages

We study the problem of bounded repairability of a given restriction tree language R into a target tree language T . More precisely, we say that R is bounded repairable with respect to T if there exists a bound on the number of standard tree editing operations necessary to apply to any tree in R to obtain a tree in T . We consider a number of possible specifications for tree languages: bottom-up tree automata (on curry encoding of unranked trees) that capture the class of XML schemas and document type definitions (DTDs). We also consider a special case when the restriction language R is universal (i.e., contains all trees over a given alphabet). We give an effective characterization of bounded repairability between pairs of tree languages represented with automata. This characterization introduces two tools—synopsis trees and a coverage relation between them—allowing one to reason about tree languages that undergo a bounded number of editing operations. We then employ this characterization to provide upper bounds to the complexity of deciding bounded repairability and show that these bounds are tight. In particular, when the input tree languages are specified with arbitrary bottom-up automata, the problem is coNExp-complete. The problem remains coNExp-complete even if we use deterministic nonrecursive DTDs to specify the input languages. The complexity of the problem can be reduced if we assume that the alphabet, the set of node labels, is fixed: the problem becomes PS pace -complete for nonrecursive DTDs and coNP-complete for deterministic nonrecursive DTDs. Finally, when the restriction tree language R is universal, we show that the bounded repairability problem becomes E xp -complete if the target language is specified by an arbitrary bottom-up tree automaton and becomes tractable (P-complete, in fact) when a deterministic bottom-up automaton is used.

A Comparative Study on Automotive Brake Testing Standards

Performance testing of automotive brakes involves determination of stopping time, distance and deceleration level. Braking performance of an automobile is required to be ensured for various surfaces like dry, wet, concrete, bitumen etc. as well as for prolonged applications. Various brake testing standards are used worldwide to assure vehicle and pedestrian safety. This article presents methodologies used for automotive service brake testing for two wheelers. The main contribution of this work lies in comparative study of three main brake testing standards; viz. Indian Standards, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and European Economic Commission Standards. This study shall help the policy makers to choose the best criteria out of these three while formulating newer edition of testing standards.

Automatic analysis of broadcast football videos using contextual priors

The presence of standard video editing practices in broadcast sports videos, like football, effectively means that such videos have stronger contextual priors than most generic videos. In this paper, we show that such information can be harnessed for automatic analysis of sports videos. Specifically, given an input video, we output per-frame information about camera angles and the events (goal, foul, etc.). Our main insight is that in the presence of temporal context (camera angles) for a video, the problem of event tagging (fouls, corners, goals, etc.) can be cast as per frame multi-class classification problem. We show that even with simple classifiers like linear SVM, we get significant improvement in the event tagging task when contextual information is included. We present extensive results for 10 matches from the recently concluded Football World Cup, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Towards a New Edition of Ovid’s Ibis

I show that the standard edition of Ovid’s Ibis , La Penna 1957, needs to be updated. Based on a fresh examination of the oldest manuscripts, my article demonstrates that La Penna’s tripartite stemma is untenable. A new bipartite stemma is proposed and justified, which results in a reappraisal of variants. I likewise show that a late humanist manuscript may preserve extra-stemmatic readings; these readings must be carefully considered. I also discuss some disputed passages, emendations, and interpolations, arguing for a more skeptical approach to the text. This article represents the necessary philological spadework for a broader project to reintegrate the Ibis into Ovid’s poetic corpus.

Greatfree: the JAVA Apis and Idioms to Program Large-Scale Distributed Systems

This paper introduces a series of APIs and idioms in Java SE (Java Standard Edition), GreatFree, to program large-scale distributed systems from scratch without adopting any third party frameworks. When programming with GreatFree, developers are required to take care of rather than be invisible to most of the implementation issues in a distributed system. It not only strengthens developers’ skills to polish a system but also provides them with the techniques to create brand new and creative systems. However, taking care of many such issues is a heavy load because of the low-level of Java SE. To alleviate the burden to program with Java SE directly, GreatFree provides numerous APIs and idioms in Java SE to help programmers resolve indispensable distributed problems, such as communication programming, serialization, asynchronous and synchronous programming, resource management, load balancing, caching, eventing, requesting/responding, multicasting, and so forth. Additionally, as an open source tool to program, developers are able to strengthen their systems through not only adjusting GreatFree parameters but also upgrading GreatFree APIs and idioms themselves. According to the current intensive experiments, it is convenient for developers to program an ordinary or a large-scale distributed system from scratch with GreatFree.

High-Content Analysis of CRISPR-Cas9 Gene-Edited Human Embryonic Stem Cells.

SummaryCRISPR-Cas9 gene editing of human cells and tissues holds much promise to advance medicine and biology, but standard editing methods require weeks to months of reagent preparation and selection where much or all of the initial edited samples are destroyed during analysis. ArrayEdit, a simple approach utilizing surface-modified multiwell plates containing one-pot transcribed single-guide RNAs, separates thousands of edited cell populations for automated, live, high-content imaging and analysis. The approach lowers the time and cost of gene editing and produces edited human embryonic stem cells at high efficiencies. Edited genes can be expressed in both pluripotent stem cells and differentiated cells. This preclinical platform adds important capabilities to observe editing and selection in situ within complex structures generated by human cells, ultimately enabling optical and other molecular perturbations in the editing workflow that could refine the specificity and versatility of gene editing.

McGill MS 143 and the Composition of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes

This article examines the fragment of Lydgate’s poem The Fall of Princes that is McGill University Library MS 143. The fragment is part of a form of the text that survives elsewhere in a complete form only in British Library MS Harley 1766, one that is very different from the form that appears in the standard modern edition. The article discusses the ways in which the McGill fragment contributes to an understanding of the nature and significance of this variant version.

CHEN WEI 陳偉 (ED.), QIN JIANDU HEJI 秦簡牘合集 [CORPUS OF QIN DOCUMENTS WRITTEN ON BAMBOO AND WOOD]: A REVIEW ARTICLE

AbstractThe Qin jiandu heji 秦簡牘合集 [Corpus of Qin documents written on bamboo and wood] is the result of a long-term teamwork and collaboration project, directed by Professor Chen Wei 陳偉 of Wuhan University. This publication provides a new, updated edition of seven collections of Qin documents, including those from Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Tomb 4 and 11), Longgang 龍崗 (Tomb 6), Haojiaping 郝家坪 (Tomb 50), Zhoujiatai 周家臺 (Tomb 30), Yueshan 嶽山 (Tomb 36), and Fangmatan 放馬灘 (Tomb 1). Although former editions have not become entirely useless for the various reasons evoked in this article, Qin jiandu heji should now be considered the new standard edition for any serious academic research on those materials.

Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century by Atria A. Larson

Master of Penance: Gratian and the Development of Penitential Thought and Law in the Twelfth Century. By Atria A. Larson. [Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Canon Law, Vol. 11.] (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2014. Pp. xx, 553. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8123-2168-7.)This careful study of Gratian's thinking on the topic of penance reworks a dissertation written at The Catholic University of America into a rich and carefully argued book. The study of Gratian and his work has recently been transformed by Anders Winroth's discovery of the original version of Gratian's groundbreaking work, a version that differs in many respects from the work regarded by scholars as Gratian's Decretum. This study considers results that help to refine the findings of Winroth in this field.The book is devoted mainly to the part of Gratian's Decretum that we know as De Penitentia and was included in causa 33, a case that discussed a man who had become impotent as a result of magical means (maleficium). When the man confessed his sin to God alone, he was relieved of his impotence, and this formed the incentive for Gratian to discuss the efficacy of confession in some detail. The treatise is thus placed rather awkwardly in the conception of the whole work. This, together with a clearly more theological approach that contrasts with the more legal character of the rest of the work, has in the past led to doubts about its authenticity. Since De Penitentia is, however, included in the first recension that Winroth discovered, it must be regarded as an authentic part of the Decretum. Several parts of the text, however, found in the standard edition of Gratian as prepared by Emil Friedberg do not appear in the early recensions and must therefore have been added later.Atria Larson carefully tries to reconstruct Gratian's thinking about penance on the basis of the text of the first recension. In doing so, she establishes that Gratian composed his work in a systematic way, the economy of which is hardly visible in the edition by Friedberg because of the many accretions included in its text. Larson is able to demonstrate that Gratian composed his work with great care and diligence, and that it ties in neatly with the other parts of the Decretum in which penance is discussed. The author establishes Gratian's reliance on many works that are associated with the school of Anselm of Laon and concludes that it would be unwise to deny the direct relationship between the two-that is, Gratian must have been a disciple of this school. That would explain the close affinities between Gratian's work and that of Peter Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor, although there is no proof of any direct acquaintance with their works (or vice versa). The affinities are to be explained by the fact that all three men were indebted to Anselm's teachings. Larson regards the Decretum first of all as a textbook, reflecting Gratian's teaching in Bologna. His work was meant to instruct the clergy and should be considered as part of a broader movement for educational reform of the clergy. …

The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad by Joseph Conrad

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad by Joseph Conrad Cedric Watts (bio) Joseph Conrad. The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 553 pp. ISBN: 9780521191920. Obliged to "declare an interest," I necessarily begin with some reminiscences. In 1964 I submitted to the Examinations Office at Cambridge University my PhD thesis entitled "Joseph Conrad and R. B. Cunninghame Graham: Their Friendship in Its Literary Aspects." Part of that thesis was an edition of eighty-one letters from Conrad to Graham. In 1969, that section of the thesis was published by Cambridge University Press as Joseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham. In my edition, I criticised G. Jean-Aubry's twovolume Joseph Conrad: Life & Letters, which at that time was the standard edition of Conrad's "collected letters." Of course, that Jean-Aubry edition, which did not purport to be complete, lacked thousands of letters. And, alas, the correspondence in Jean-Aubry's two volumes was badly edited. His transcriptions were often inaccurate, and so were his annotations. He had censored some of the letters without giving the reader any indication that censorship had taken place. My own edition had its flaws, of course. Since Conrad's French was comprehensible to me (although I had no formal qualifications in French), I deemed a translation unnecessary; but American reviewers soon persuaded me that a translation of the French would have been helpful. There was also an error in dating, and there were some proof-errors. But the reviewers were, on the whole, kind and even enthusiastic. [End Page 100] At that time, Professor Frederick R. Karl in New York had started to assemble the materials for a "Collected Letters." In view of the response to Joseph Conrad's Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, in 1970 Cambridge University Press asked me to join Professor Karl in editing that new big collection. After discussion with Karl, and due reflection, I declined to do so. One reason was that, in the time available, I wished to write about numerous authors in whose works I found intriguing puzzles: Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Keats, Ibsen, and Graham Greene, for example. I recommended that, instead of me, the Press should employ Laurence Davies. At that time, I was supervising Laurence's Sussex University PhD thesis, "R.B. Cunninghame Graham and the Concept of Impressionism," and I had been greatly impressed by Laurence's range of abilities. To put it frankly: I believed he would do a better job on the "Collected Letters" than I could. He had a globe-trotter's energy, a lucid intelligence, a wide range of knowledge, a liberal outlook, and linguistic sensitivity. Time has vindicated my belief in his abilities. I looked on with growing admiration and, indeed, wonder, as the great sequence of volumes gradually emerged over the following thirty-seven years up to 2007. Laurence, at first collaborating with Fred Karl, emerged as the main editor of the immense series. At various times, he has been aided by numerous able co-editors: Owen Knowles, Gene M. Moore, and the late J.H. Stape, with the late Hans van Marle as a wise advisor, heading a large team of assistants. Nevertheless, Laurence has been the central figure in this immense project. And with every volume, his command has become more assured. He is immensely resourceful and energetic. He is formidably intelligent, and his cultural knowledge has such range and depth that anyone, however well qualified, should be able to learn from his introductions and annotations. His urbanity and scholarly acumen are leavened by a sense of humour and an appreciation of irony. Of course, in so vast an undertaking there were plenty of local errors. Usually these were corrected in a subsequent volume. At the same time, the Cambridge edition of Conrad's novels, tales, essays, and autobiographical writings has been proceeding. That Cambridge edition is indispensable, since it has yielded many valuable new readings, but it has been marred by the decision to remove house styling which Conrad generally accepted. The result is a Conrad whose style often seems under-punctuated, and sometimes, indeed, seems illogical or uncouth. To take...