The Birth of Shakespeare's Birthplace

"There is, indeed, little doubt,” the formidable scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps confidently explained to the Victorian readers of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, “that the Birth-place did not become one of the incentives for pilgrimage until public attention had been specially directed to it at the time of the Jubilee.” That's broadly true. The earliest reference to the three-gabled, half-timbered house (two houses, originally) on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon as the birthplace of William Shakespeare dates only from the late 1750s, when it was so named in Samuel Winter's town map. During the Stratford Jubilee, which David Garrick organized in 1769, the “small old house,” as the actor's first biographer called it, was fully recognized and promoted as the place where Shakespeare was born. Even so, Halliwell-Phillipps's observation conceals more than it reveals, because there is also little doubt that the dwelling that tradition calls Shakespeare's birthplace did not suddenly acquire that status during the first week of September 1769. The process by which the unremarkable piece of real estate that John Shakespeare purchased sometime in the late sixteenth century was transformed into what Barbara Hodgdon has rightly called the “controlling ideological center” of Shakespeare biography was long, slow, and far from inevitable. That process is the subject of this essay.

Molecular mapping the presence of druggable targets in preinvasive and precursor breast lesions:a comprehensive review of biomarkers related to therapeutic interventions

The analysis of clinical breast samples using biomarkers is integral to current breast cancer management. Currently, a limited number of targeted therapies are standard of care in breast cancer treatment. However, these targeted therapies are only suitable for a subset of patients and resistance may occur. Strategies to prevent the occurrence of invasive lesions are required to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with the development of cancer. In theory, application of targeted therapies to pre-invasive lesions will prevent their progression to invasive lesions with full malignant potential. The diagnostic challenge for pathologists is to make interpretative decisions on early detected pre-invasive lesions. Overall, only a small proportion of these pre-invasive lesions will progress to invasive carcinoma and morphological assessment is an imprecise and subjective means to differentiate histologically identical lesions with varying malignant potential. Therefore differential biomarker analysis in pre-invasive lesions may prevent overtreatment with surgery and provide a predictive indicator of response to therapy. There follows a review of established and emerging potential druggable targets in pre-invasive lesions and correlation with lesion morphology.

Introduction Special Section on David Clarke's Archaeology: the Loss of Innocence 25 years after:with Simon Stoddart

Malone, C.A.T. and S.K.F. Stoddart, Special Section. Introduction. David Clarke's 'Archaeology: the loss of Innocence' (1973) 25 years after.

Review of: Ucko, P; Hunter, M; Clark, A; and David, A. Avebury reconsidered: from the 1660s to the 1990s. London, Unwin Hyman. 1991.

, Albion, 1993. 25(2): p. 318-9.