London Times Research Articles

How tube strikes affect macroscopic and link travel times in London

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the five strikes on the London Underground (metro) rail system, which occurred in 2009 and 2010, on macroscopic and road link travel times. A consequence of these strikes was an increase in road traffic flows above usual levels. This provides an opportunity to observe the operation of the road network under unusually high flows. The first objective involves the examination of strike effects on inbound (IT) and outbound traffic (OT) within central, inner and outer London. Travel time data obtained from automatic number plate recognition cameras are used within the first part of the analysis. The second more detailed objective was to investigate in spatio-temporal effects on travel times on five road links. Correlation analyses and general linear models are developed using both traffic flow and travel time data. According to the results of the study, the morning IT had approximately twice as much delay as the OT. Central London experienced the highest delays, followed by inner and outer London. As would be expected, the unique full-day strike in 2009 yielded the worst impact on the network with the highest percentage increase in total travel time (60%) occurring during the morning peak in the IT in inner London. The results from the link-level analysis showed statistical significance amongst the examined links indicating heterogeneous effects from one link to another. It was also found that travel time changes may be more effectively captured through time-of-day terms compared to hourly traffic flows.

Ground Zero – the socio-political minefield of symbolic architecture

Daniel Libeskind is today one of the architecture profession’s media elite. He took up his position in the list of ‘super star architects’ twenty ago and has remained in the spotlight of the press ever since. He has projects across the globe and has been awarded prizes by Time Magazine, The Goethe Institute, the American Institute of Architects and the RIBA. He was also appointed the first Cultural Ambassador for Architecture by the State Department of the United States in 2004. He has been both critically lauded and sardonically ridiculed. Tom Dyckhoff of the London Times refers to him as a ‘global brand’. His most high profile project to date has been The Jewish Museum of Berlin which, after various years of partial completion, was finally opened in full on September 11 2001. The opening day of Libeskind’s commemoration of the twentieth century’s act of horror par excellence then, was also the day of the twenty-first century’s most iconic terrorist act. The macabre irony was not lost on Libeskind himself but the competition that led to him being appointed master planner and architect of the Ground Zero project, turned out to be a dirty, personalised and publically aired media circus. It was a story of political infighting, tawdry economic deals and architectural brinkmanship. It culminated ten years ago this month with Libeskind’s ‘victory.’ In this interview Daniel Libeskind looks back over a decade of working on this project and muses on one of the most high profile, emotive and polemic architectural projects of recent times.

Bernard Shaw’s Admirable Bashville: Playwright and Prizefighter

Abstract Bernard Shaw’s little blank-verse play, The Admirable Bashville, or, Constancy Unrewarded is a play where two types of performance, sport and drama, interact on the stage. It was written in 1901 and it was performed three times in London under Shaw's auspices in 1901, in 1904, and in January-February 1909. Its next performance was in Vienna in 1924; then it was performed in Sydney in 1927. Shaw was an enthusiastic admirer of the bare - knuckled art of fighting, though he has written Bashville as a portrait of a period when this art was disapearing to be replaced by the noble art of boxing, under the new Queenberry’s rulling. This essay examines both the play itself, throwing new lights over obscur characters of the play, such as Cetewayo the Black African king, and even over Bashville, the prize-fighter. As copyrights laws of that period did not guarantee Shaw’s rights over his works, the paper shows Shaw’s attempts to keep the copyrights over his work, by performing the play as many times and under any conditions. Under copyright laws he could lose all his rights if the play were performed by other producers beforehand. The Admirable Bashville is a minor play by a major playwright, and Shaw never pretended it was anything more.

Highlight: Family Ties--New Evidence Simplifies Human Evolutionary Tree

Rest easy, it seems our ancestors were not the interspecies Casanovas once supposed. After humans went their separate way from chimpanzees, we made a clean break of it, each group mating within its species, a new analysis suggested by geneticist Tadashi and coworkers. This is a thorough rewrite of the evolutionary narrative told by David Reich, Nick Patterson, and colleagues at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, MA. In 2006, the popular press rang with near-salacious headlines such as “Late swinging in the evolutionary tree?” from The Philadelphia Inquirer and “Grandpa! Leave that chimp alone! Who knows what it might lead to?” from The Times of London. That year in Nature, Reich and Patterson presented evidence that, following an initial genetic split 6 million years ago, humans and chimpanzees interbred for a time as a hybridized species. The analysis was not universally well received. “We’d like to have a more Victorian view of our genome,” David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge told the New York Times. ”This reminds us that we are really animals.” However, beyond the giggle-inducing implications, a number of phylogenists did not like it for more practical reasons. The explanation was complicated and based on thin evidence. “In it very small numbers were given large importance,” said Dan Graur, who studies molecular evolution at the University of Houston. “This very complicated model has been making its way into literature and textbooks. But the problem is that people have ignored the fact of recombination.” During meiosis, matching chromosomes can swap whole sections of material, leaving Junior with new-sprung genetic diversity, but phylogenists with a newly complicated picture. However, in a new study published in Genome Biology and Evolution (Hara et al. 2012), researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology in Tokyo and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa managed to sidestep this problem entirely. “What was done in this case this was quite amazing,” said Graur, who was not involved in the work. “The limits are not contaminated by half-maternal, half-paternal material.” By comparing shorter segments that are unlikely to have recombined since humans shared a common ancestor with the great apes, they were able to trace evolutionary history without seeing any hint that different linages had once converged into one. “Everyone who is doing primate evolution will be affected by this,” Graur said. When asked how much their work negates previous work in the field, Imanishi was modest: “Our estimates of human-ape divergence times and the ancestral population sizes are not much different from those of previous works,” he wrote. “However, by using the largest dataset of genome sequences and applying a much better model to the data, we succeeded in presenting the most accurate estimates ever.” Their work, so far, has been warmly received by colleagues. “It seems that many evolutionary biologists, including Dr. Naruya Saitou of National Institute of Genetics of Japan […] did not like the hypothesis by Patterson et al. and wanted to deny it. We could demonstrate what they intuitively thought.” In addition, the researchers are intrigued by several other aspects of their study. They were also surprised by the finding that each chromosome seems to have an intrinsic mutation rate. “We concluded that variation in tau [speciation time] across the chromosomes would be due to the difference in mutation rate across the chromosomes,” writes Yuichiro Hara. “But we could not find the cause of the variation in mutation rate. We are interested in the mechanisms of genome evolution in closely related lineages (Hara and Imanishi, 2011, BMC Evol. Biol.), too, and thus clarification of this is our next goal.” And beyond that the team is also interested in seeing their novel analytical method applied to other species. Graur is similarly eager to see this method become more widespread, “These days complicated models are used as a first resort rather than a last resort. It’s nice to see such a straightforward and ingenious approach to solve a problem that was quite complicated.” He is especially interested in seeing the relationship between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovians explored. Some claim that modern Papua New Guineans carry fragments of the Denisovian genome and paleolithic hominids believed to exist based on a tiny amount of DNA extracted from a finger bone found several years ago in a Siberian cave. Graur did have one criticism. “If I was writing up this work, I would have said that everything that was said before about the speciation was junk. The authors are very polite. They could have been more forceful.”

“The Ultimate Step:” Judah P. Benjamin and Secession

“The Ultimate Step:” Judah P. Benjamin and Secession Geoffrey D. Cunningham (bio) Judah Philip Benjamin’s singular life and career have long attracted interest. An antebellum Southern politician of Jewish background, Benjamin rose to prominence during the nation’s greatest political crisis. Given Benjamin’s compelling story and involvement in the weightiest events of the era, it is not surprising that three biographers and the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, who designated Benjamin the “dark prince” of the South in his 1927 poem “John Brown’s Body,” have written about his life.1 Owing to their efforts, we know about Benjamin’s identity as a Southern Jew and his role in the Confederate cabinet, but comparatively less about his developing attitude toward secession. By taking a second look at Benjamin’s state and U.S. Senate career, a surprising portrait emerges. Although Benjamin is conventionally portrayed by scholars as irresolute with regard to secession, his public addresses reveal a different picture and help to cast light on his identity as an antebellum Southern politician. In fact, Benjamin’s speeches, which comprise the largest extant body of sources, reveal Benjamin to have embraced the logic of secession early in his career. While never a fire-eater or an extremist, Benjamin publicly embraced secession’s logic with remarkable rapidity. During his first address to his Senate colleagues in 1855, Benjamin confessed: “Every day I am more and more persuaded [conflict] is becoming inevitable.”2 By his second address, Benjamin had moved from discussing the likelihood of conflict to raising the specter of secession: “When those guarantees shall fail, and not till then, will the injured, outraged South throw her sword into the scale of her rights, and appeal to the God of battles to do her justice.”3 Thus, as early as Benjamin’s second address to the Senate in 1855, he was contemplating the idea of secession. Unlike Jefferson Davis, about whom poet Robert Penn Warren wrote, “Even . . . as a leading [End Page 1] exponent of Southern rights, [Davis] found it hard to face the logically ultimate step of secession,” Benjamin evinced no such public reservations when the time came in 1860.4 In fact, with President Abraham Lincoln’s election, Benjamin unreservedly took the “ultimate step.” Piercing the public persona of Judah Benjamin’s colorful life and intriguing career is a nearly insurmountable task. Concerned about his legacy, Benjamin destroyed nearly all of his personal papers.5 Given that fact, every study of Benjamin is faced with the difficulty of limited sources. The first biography of Benjamin, Judah P. Benjamin, written by Pierce Butler in 1907, amassed previously uncollected materials from Benjamin’s relatives and acquaintances, including journalist Francis Lawley of the London Times. Butler’s work remained the only biography of Benjamin for more than thirty years, until 1943, when Robert Douthat Meade published Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate Statesman. In supplanting Butler’s work, Meade focused on Benjamin’s role as a Confederate politician, and evaluated Benjamin’s tenure in the cabinet. With the passage of time, Meade offered a more measured historical assessment of Benjamin’s role, and as a result, his work has been brought back into print.6 After Meade’s work, it took nearly thirty years for another treatment of Benjamin to appear. Published in 1988, Eli Evans’ Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate analyzes the role that Judaism played in Benjamin’s life. Drawing upon his own identity as a Southern Jew, Evans writes that his work is an attempt to restore the “hidden Jewish experience” of Benjamin’s life in order to “clarify some of what has been impenetrable about the Confederate story.” “At times,” he continues, “I provide my own insights in the book, because I cannot help but feel that even though our boyhoods were separated by more than a hundred years, Benjamin is not remote. He is somehow familiar because there are certain changeless verities to growing up Jewish in the Bible Belt and passing for white in that mysterious hinterland of America.”7 Although [End Page 2] Benjamin’s public persona was secular, Evans argues, “to presume Benjamin a nonbeliever by his public acts represents a fundamental error in...

Meredith Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for InwardnessTudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness. Meredith Skura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+301.

<i>Meredith Skura</i>, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness<i>Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness</i>. Meredith Skura. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. xii+301.

Why and How Should the Libor Be Reformed?

Over the last year, large-scale investigations have been launched around the world on allegations of possible collusion and manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (“Libor”).The Libor has been called “the world’s most important number.” It is a primary benchmark for global short-term interest rates; the Libor is used as the basis for settlement of interest rate contracts on many of the world’s major futures and options exchanges as well as most over-the-counter and lending transactions with an estimated value of U.S. $350-$400 trillion contracts, instruments and transactions referencing it. The Libor is supposed to measure the rate at which large banks can borrow unsecured funds from other banks at various short-term maturities, and for a variety of currencies. The U.S. dollar-denominated Libor, for example, was set as follows until recently: On a daily basis, the 16 participating banks are surveyed by the British Bankers Association (BBA) and submit sealed quotes which answer: “[a]t what rate could you borrow funds, were you to do so by asking for and then accepting interbank offers in a reasonable market size just prior to 11:00 a.m. London time?” The Libor is then computed by averaging over the middle eight quotes and disregarding the four highest and the four lowest.Following the launch of these investigations and the discovery of documents which suggest that manipulation and collusion may have taken place, some are now calling for a comprehensive reform of the Libor. Still others, however, are reluctant to reform the Libor system, arguing that it is not fundamentally broken and reforms may prove more disruptive than helpful. In this article I review what I believe are the inherent problems in the structure of the Libor process and put forward a proposal for its reform.

Reporting from the Front

In 2004, Deborah Haynes, now the Defence Editor of The Times in London, experienced reporting from a war zone for the first time. Her first assignment took her to Iraq, where, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, sixty journalists lost their lives that year. Here, she gives a personal account of her experiences reporting from the front line in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Forging an English Bohemia

Forging an English Bohemia Tracy C. Davis (bio) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870. By Jacky Bratton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; pp. 230. 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in late Victorian Britain. By Nicholas Freeman. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011; pp. 248. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter. By Marty Gould. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2011; pp. 262. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. By Sadiah Qureshi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011; pp. 392. Misapprehensions that the Victorian period was quaint may arise through erroneous contrasts with our own time. We think of the twenty-first century as an age of rapid global communication, yet in the 1890s a telegraph could travel from Manchester in the north of England to the west coast of Canada then back to Manchester in ninety seconds (Freeman 77–78). That may be quicker than e-mails can travel on a dial-up connection or just as speedy as a text message can be sent and returned, even when cell-phone towers are well-placed. The rapid circulation of same-day news brought an unprecedented level of cohesion within the empire by the mid-Victorian period. In 1854, the transmission of William Russell’s Crimean dispatches to the London Times transformed Britons from patriotic nationalists into anxious war skeptics, demoralized by news of battles commanded by aging, out-of-touch generals, hospitals clogged with diseased (not merely wounded) soldiers, [End Page 287] and near-starvation conditions suffered during an unanticipated frigid winter campaign. When the debacle was brought home by telegraph, the world seemed to shrink. Even Tennyson’s galloping lines “Into the valley of the shadow of death / Rode the six hundred,” published in The Examiner six weeks after the charge of the Light Brigade, memorialized the seeming immediacy of the events and ubiquity of their impact: “When can their glory fade? / O the wild charge they made! / All the world wondered.” Flows of information as well as peoples contributed to a growing sense of access, immediacy, and contact. Entertainment was integral to this effect. Whether through the visits of cricketers, the exhibition of natives from Cape province, or melodramas depicting the Victoria gold rush, the imperial periphery was brought to London, making it the quintessential contact zone. Imperialism was both economic and governmental, but it was also reinforced through the cheap daily press, genteel exhibition halls, and thriving theatres of the West End. Jacky Bratton calls the West End “a portal on to a world of pleasure” (5), replete with the finest in shopping, especially for those in search of the luxury trades, and retreats for the most debauched sensualists and inveterate gamblers, as well as performance venues for the newly emergent middle classes. Others have chronicled the process of making the West End1—building infrastructure, developing the interdependent service industries, and gradually sharpening incipient boundaries around St. James’s plush townhouses in the west, the shopping paradise of Oxford Street in the north, journalists’ offices and law courts in the east, and the traffic-clogged Strand along the southern periphery—but Bratton takes it up anew as a topic in theatre history. The consolidation of the West End between 1840 and 1870 was commensurate with the expansion of telegraphic networks, the building and buttressing of national and metropolitan rail networks, and the emergence of a professional class of artists and managers who kept the pump primed with entertainments. This, she argues, in tandem with the serialization of realist novels, shaped Victorian expectations of the scope of British dominion over self and other, gentility and baser instincts, masculinity and femininity. For Nicholas Freeman, the West End is where Oscar Wilde’s dramas—and trials—played out. Whereas Bratton geographically maps London, first from the perspective of a pleasure-seeking woman then as a journalist, Freeman affectively maps social preoccupations from September 1894 to December 1895, contrasting the excruciating privations of those suffering from a severe winter, influenza, and diphtheria outbreaks with the exhilarating self-destructive spree that marked Wilde’s last months...

The antisemitism of Henry Wickham Steed

ABSTRACT Henry Wickham Steed (1871–1956), then editor-in-chief of the London Times, adopted an ambiguous position with regard to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion when the tract first appeared in English in 1920. He neither endorsed nor rejected it but instead mused in the editorial pages of The Times about whether it might be authentic. The following year, when The Times correspondent in Istanbul brought out proof that The Protocols was a forgery, Steed accepted his correspondent's findings and publicly retracted his earlier ambivalent position. This incident reflects on Steed's (deserved) reputation as an antisemite but it also suggests something of the complexity of his position. Steed's denunciations of Jewish influence, discovered, by his own account, through his experience as a foreign correspondent in Vienna before the First World War, are recurrent in his writings. At the same time, Steed lent strong support to Zionist aspirations at the time of the Balfour Declaration and thereafter, and, in the 1930s, he was among the very first English critics of Hitler's antisemitism. In this article, I propose to offer some hypotheses regarding Steed's antisemitism. Strange as it may sound in the wake of the Second World War, it was Steed's visceral Germanophobia that lay at the heart of his antisemitism. Until the advent of the Third Reich, Steed identified Jews with Germans and with German interests. As an ardent exponent of the ‘principle of nationality’, however, Steed consistently extended his advocacy of statehood for various Eastern European nationalities to the Jewish national cause. A final factor that helps to explain Steed's suspiciousness and gullibility is that, by disposition and as a lifelong journalist, he was drawn to conspiracy theories. He created a number of sensations in his career and, to return to the example of The Protocols, he was loath to discount so spectacular a conspiracy story.

Effects of Tube Strikes on Journey Times in Transport Network of London

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of five underground strikes on journey times in London's transport network during 2009 and 2010. The main data source for this study was automatic number plate recognition cameras, which were installed on the entrances and exits of 670 travel links that covered the vast majority of the network and were equivalent to a total length of 1,740 km. The determination of spatio-temporal differences of strike effects between the first and the remaining strike days, the identification of changes in departure and arrival times, and the estimation of travel time delays within central, inner, and outer London, as well as between inbound and outbound traffic, were the main objectives of the study. The total travel time within the examined areas, the excess delay, and the corresponding percentage difference in journey times were the main performance measurements used. The most significant results showed that the second day of strikes resulted in significant delays as opposed to the first strike days. The peaks elongated by approximately 45 to 60 min, while the unique full-day strike had the highest percentage increase in travel times, especially during the evening period (74%). Central London was generally affected the most, especially during the morning peak, which experienced an average increase in travel times of 35%, while Central London also had the highest percentage of negatively affected links (80%). The inbound traffic experienced, on average, high delays during the morning peak; the outbound traffic yielded greater delays during the evening period.

Rififi

Rififi* A. Van Jordan (bio) They take as men are wont to do—with zeal, like men who want more from the world, which sounds like a noble endeavor, but when they plan, their plans involve hurting others, if necessary, like men will do when they desire and every building, every storefront window, every locked door, every vault with jewels, even an open door, or a cop on a beat watching a building, forms a means to an end. The entire world fills with men wanting more, which sounds ignoble when this involves hurting others. When men with an endeavor— men with patience, with skill—can hurt the world, they do. They take, as men are wont to do, with zeal. [End Page 7] A. Van Jordan A. Van Jordan is the author of Rise, published by Tia Chucha Press (2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. His second book, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, published by W.W. Norton & Co. (2004), was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times. Jordan was also awarded a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2004 and a Pushcart Prize in 2006, 30th Edition. Quantum Lyrics was published in July 2007 by W.W. Norton & Co. He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), and a United States Artist Williams Fellowship (2008). He is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. Footnotes * For Jules Dassin, 1955 Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Richard Westall's Labours of Love

Previous article No AccessRichard Westall's Labours of LoveRichard J. WestallRichard J. Westall Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 1Winter 2012Wordsworth Summer Conference Papers: A Selection: 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045517 Views: 8Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey (review)

Reviewed by: Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey Nathaniel Myers Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey, ed. Benjamin Keatinge and Aengus Woods, pp. 288. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, $69.95. Distributed by International Specialized Booksellers, Portland, OR. As with many critical works that focus on a relatively obscure literary figure, one of the primary goals of Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey is to reclaim his reputation in the face of a literary history that, for various reasons, has privileged some writers over others. Undoubtedly, the poet Brian Coffey (1904–1995), who was Irish-born but who spent considerable time in Paris, Missouri, and London—an itinerancy that already defies literary history’s basic categories of nation-based identity—is much less well-known than his peer Samuel Beckett, or even Thomas Mac Greevy, each of whom receive frequent mention in the essays and anecdotes that comprise this collection. In some acts of literary reclamation, the need to prove the author’s—and thus, the critic’s own—value can leave readers with an unpleasant aftertaste. Not so with Other Edens, a collection of erudite essays and biographical sketches that both develop the critical paths of inquiry into Brian Coffey’s work and pay warm homage to the poet, philosopher, teacher, and family man. Of course, many of the included essays do attempt to revise literary history in the hopes of figuring Coffey more prominently. J.C.C. Mays’s essay “Brian Coffey’s Review of Beckett’s Murphy: ‘Take warning while you praise,’” is one such essay. Mays is arguably the poet’s most significant critic, and his analysis of Coffey’s previously unpublished review of Murphy—which is, to the reader’s delight, included in the essay itself—enumerates the reasons for the poet’s particular insight into Beckett’s otherwise misunderstood and poorly reviewed first published novel. Had the review appeared concurrently with the book’s 1938 release, Mays asserts, it would have been both a boon to the poet who was intellectually capable of handling the material and a necessary corrective to Beckett studies, which, he argues, has been led astray by Hugh Kenner’s Cartesian reading for too long. Equally, other essays argue the poet’s literary significance by examining his work on its own terms. These essays can, at times, feel almost like line-by-line readings of the poetry itself. But the density of Coffey’s poetry is such that many of the erudite arguments made by these critics demand a narrative-like [End Page 154] explication tracing the development of themes and ideas. At the literal center of the book are three such essays, one each from editors Keatinge and Woods, and one from James Matthew Wilson. Keatinge’s “‘Missouri Sequence’ and the Search for a Habitat” examines what many consider Coffey’s most accessible work in order to parse the different forms and definitions of “habitat”—from the topographical to the linguistic—that the poet probes in the piece. Wilson, too, focuses on this particular work to trace the influence of French philosopher Jacques Maritain (with whom Coffey corresponded) to lay bare the metaphysical, ontological and eschatological underpinnings of the poem. Woods locates in Coffey’s seldom-considered love poetry a metaphysics at work that, while influenced by Hegel and Levinas, is original to the poet; the result is a poetic that does not so much articulate a concept of love but which, much more interestingly, attempts to enact analogously the experience of love. In its way, Woods’s essay offers readers a guide with which to approach Coffey’s aesthetic. If many of these essays at times also read like explications of the poetry, some of the pieces do unabashedly provide keys for appreciating the poet: Coffey’s highly allusive, fractured, syntactically experimental modernist techniques can turn off the casual reader. Geoffrey Squires’s “Eight Lines of Coffey: A Note on Prosody” is a welcome addition. Extracting eight lines of poetry from their original contexts, Squires analyzes each for its stylistic qualities, noting such aspects as line length, register, syntax and grammar, as well as offering some bold qualitative assessments. In...

The Darwin archipelago: the naturalist's career beyond Origin of species

Charles Darwin is of course best known for Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species. But he produced many other books over his long career, exploring specific aspects of the theory of evolution by natural selection in greater depth. The eminent evolutionary biologist Steve Jones uses these lesser-known works as springboards to examine how their essential ideas have generated whole fields of modern biology.Earthworms helped found modern soil science, Expression of the Emotions helped found comparative psychology, and Self-Fertilization and Forms of Flowers were important early works on the origin of sex. Through this delightful introduction to Darwin's oeuvre, one begins to see Darwin's role in biology as resembling Einstein's in physics: he didn't have one brilliant idea but many and in fact made some seminal contribution to practically every field of evolutionary study. Though these lesser-known works may seem disconnected, Jones points out that they all share a common theme: the power of small means over time to produce gigantic ends. Called a world of wonders by the Times of London, Darwin Archipelago will expand any reader's view of Darwin's genius and will demonstrate how all of biology, like life itself, descends from a common ancestor.

Remaking England’s National Health Service? Not So Fast

EntryPoint Health AffairsVol. 30, No. 8: New Perspectives On Substance Abuse Remaking England’s National Health Service? Not So FastNicholas Timmins Affiliations Nicholas Timmins ( [email protected] ) is public policy editor of the Financial Times in London; a visiting professor in public management at King’s College London; and a senior associate of the Nuffield Trust. PUBLISHED:August 2011No Accesshttps://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2011.0724AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextView PDFPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions View articleAbstractAfter encountering huge resistance to its plan to remake the National Health Service, the government of Prime Minister David Cameron puts its reform plan into rehab.TOPICSHealth servicesQuality of carePrimary careLegislationPharmaceuticalsHospital careHospitalsHealth care providersPrescription drugsDecision making Loading Comments... Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. DetailsExhibitsReferencesRelated Article Metrics History Published online 1 August 2011 Information Project HOPE—The People-to-People Health Foundation, Inc. PDF download

Em meus olhos e ouvidos: música popular, deslocamento no espaço urbano e a produção de sentidos em lugares dos Beatles

Meu propósito é investigar como a música popular, através de trocas culturais que marcam a construção de identidades atribuídas a grupos e lugares, define vínculos e fronteiras no tecido urbano, ao mesmo tempo em que evidencia as trajetórias traçadas pelos músicos que o atravessam. Para tanto, optei pelo estudo formal e contextual de Strawberry Fields Forever e Penny Lane, canções dos Beatles que produzem sentidos sobre "lugares" e que congregaram memórias e identidades construídas em sua experiência como citadinos no deslocamento desde seu passado em Liverpool ao presente de então em Londres.

Tracer concentration profiles measured in central London as part of the REPARTEE campaign

Abstract. There have been relatively few tracer experiments carried out that have looked at vertical plume spread in urban areas. In this paper we present results from two tracer (cyclic perfluorocarbon) experiments carried out in 2006 and 2007 in central London centred on the BT Tower as part of the REPARTEE (Regent's Park and Tower Environmental Experiment) campaign. The height of the tower gives a unique opportunity to study vertical dispersion profiles and transport times in central London. Vertical gradients are contrasted with the relevant Pasquill stability classes. Estimation of lateral advection and vertical mixing times are made and compared with previous measurements. Data are then compared with a simple operational dispersion model and contrasted with data taken in central London as part of the DAPPLE campaign. This correlates dosage with non-dimensionalised distance from source. Such analyses illustrate the feasibility of the use of these empirical correlations over these prescribed distances in central London.

Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (review)

Reviewed by: Wolf: The Lives of Jack London Kevin J. Hayes (bio) Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, by James L. Haley. New York: Basic Books, 2010. xvi + 364 pp. Cloth, $29.95. After the Jack London Society's Tenth Biennial Symposium in Santa Rosa last November, I left California excited to keep researching London's life and writings. Consequently, when I received an invitation to review the latest London biography, I readily accepted. Before continuing my review, I must fess up: I did not spend all my time in Santa Rosa at the symposium. Having worked there as a bicycle mechanic for a few months a few decades ago, I played hooky one afternoon to seek out my old haunts, which proved to be a difficult task. The bike shop is now a restaurant supply house; the breakfast joint where I used to enjoy huevos rancheros has closed; and the deli where I ate lunch has given way to a Whole Foods Market. If I had this much trouble trying to reconstruct a tiny part of my personal past, imagine how much more difficult it is to reconstruct the life of someone who lived a hundred years ago, especially someone who lived as varied and adventurous a life as Jack London. This is the task James Haley sets for himself in Wolf: The Lives of Jack London. Haley gets off to a shaky start. His prologue gives readers a brief overview of London's early life from childhood until his trek to the Klondike, where, on January 27, 1898, he made up his mind to become a professional writer. Since this prologue mentions some of the most crucial turning points in London's life, I wondered upon reading it whether Haley gave away too much too soon. Such proves to be the case. For the next several chapters, he retells the story of London's early life, but every detail that he repeats from the prologue seems redundant. Not until Haley is more than [End Page 199] a third of the way through the book does he get back to January 27, 1898. Now, I thought, the redundancies will end. But they do not, for there is much else that is redundant in Wolf. The book's structure partly contributes to its redundancy. To relate the story of London's life, Haley tells it as a series of lives. Chapter 1, "The Work Beast," describes London's time as a factory worker during his adolescence and early teens. Chapter 2, "The Oyster Pirate," relates how and why London learned to sail: to raid the commercial oyster beds of San Francisco Bay. Twelve additional chapters treat London's other lives in the following order: seal hunter, tramp, student, prospector, aspiring writer, muckraker, war correspondent, lover, celebrity, sailor, rancher, and jade. Though the early chapters proceed chronologically, from Chapter 7, "The Aspiring Writer," to Chapter 14, "The Jade," there is much overlap in terms of chronology. Furthermore, these chapters create some strange breaks in the narrative. The Call of the Wild receives one paragraph at the end of the muckraker chapter and further brief mention in the chapter treating London's time in Korea as a war correspondent. In short, the multiple lives structure forces Haley to slight the most important part of London's life: the books he wrote. Haley begins his acknowledgments with an observation: "The idea of publishing a literary biography in today's marketplace is a brave one." His words remind me of something my editor said when I wanted to title my Jefferson biography "The Road to Monticello: The Literary Life of Thomas Jefferson." "We can't use the phrase 'literary life,'" she told me, "That's the kiss of death." So, how did Haley manage to publish a literary biography in today's marketplace? The answer is: He didn't. Wolf is a biography of Jack London, but it scarcely qualifies as a literary biography: it downplays London's writings to concentrate on more exciting aspects of his life. The Call of the Wild is not the only book to receive short shrift. The Sea-Wolf is subsumed within the Korea chapter. The Iron Heel...

Constrained authors: Bylines and authorship in news reporting

The proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, opening the way towards journalistic stardom, altering power relations within the news industry and shifting news organizations from a position behind the news to one behind the people who gather and compose it. Focusing on The New York Times as the chief case study and The Times of London as a supplementary one, findings show that the bylining process extended throughout the 20th century at a far slower pace than indicated in previous research. Bylining was a four-stage process: 1) initial avoidance of bylining, thereby fostering an anonymous, authoritative voice; 2) bylines promoting organizational goals only; 3) bylines accorded to a select few staff writers, leading to inconsistency in attribution policy; and 4) papers lose control over selective crediting due to journalists’ pressure for public acclaim. Using a multidisciplinary approach combining legal theory with the sociology and history of journalism, the article concludes that news reporters are constrained authors whose limitations are set chiefly by organizational, legal and commercial forces. These limitations not only delayed and slowed down their attribution but also continue to characterize their authorship to this day.