Screening-detected non-symptomatic breast cancer: a case history

Alice is a 65 year-old woman who was recalled for further investigations following a routine screening mammogram, which showed a 25 mm mass in her left breast. This case history will report on the further investigations and surgery required to manage this infiltrating ductal carcinoma. The histopathology report will be analysed to provide a rationale for future treatment with radiotherapy, and Alice's expected prognosis will be presented using the Nottingham Prognostic Index. Alice's psychological support needs will identified and the appropriate interventions will be discussed with a particular focus on Alice's history of depression. The supportive and educational role of the breast care nurse and the multidisciplinary team will be highlighted throughout the study.

Advertising Colonial Romance and Imperial Masculinity: The Promotion of Philip Meadows Taylor's Novels in Britain

The comments of Charles Kegan Paul, the Victorian publisher who was involved in publishing the novels of the nineteenth-century British-Indian author Philip Meadows Taylor as single volume reprints in the 1880s, are illuminating. They are indicative of the publisher's position with regard to publishing - that there was often no correlation between commercial success and the artistic merit of a work. According to Kegan Paul, a substandard or mediocre text would be commercially successful as long it met a perceived want on the part of the public. In effect, the ruminations of the publisher suggests that a firm desirous of acquiring commercial success for a work should be an astute judge of the pre-existing wants of consumers within the market. Yet Theodor Adorno, writing in the mid-twentieth century, offers an entirely distinctive perspective to Kegan Paul's observations, arguing that there is nothing foreordained about consumer demand for certain cultural tropes or productions. They in fact are driven by an industry that preempts and conditions the possible reactions of the consumer. Both Kegan Paul's and Adorno's insights are illuminating when it comes to addressing the key issues explored in this essay. Kegan Paul's comments allude to the ways in which the publisher's promotion of Philip Meadows Taylor's fictional depictions of India and its peoples were to a large extent driven in the mid- to late-nineteenth century by their expectations of what metropolitan readers desired at any given time, whereas Adorno's insights reveal the ways in which British-Indian narratives and the public identity of their authors were not assured in advance, but were, to a large extent, engineered by the publishing industry and the literary marketplace.

Anatomising Irish Rebellion: the Cromwellian Delinquency Commissions, the Books of Discrimination and the 1641 Depositions

The recent digitisation of the 1641 depositions has opened up that large and controversial collection of manuscripts to renewed study. The significance of a substantial section of that archive generated in 1653-4 by the work of the Cromwellian delinquency commissions has hitherto been poorly understood. This article sheds new light on the workings of the commissions and on the ways in which the 'delinquency depositions' that they collected helped to shape the implementation of the Cromwellian and Restoration land settlements in Ireland. It also compares the Irish delinquency proceedings to the approach adopted by the Long Parliament in its dealings with royalists in England in the 1640s. In analysing the actual content of the depositions, the article focuses particular attention on County Wexford. The surviving delinquency depositions enable in-depth exploration of many facets of the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath in that region.

Divided Conquerors: the Rump Parliament, Cromwell's Army and Ireland

This article reassesses the relationship that existed in the period 1649–53 between war in Ireland and politics in England. Drawing upon a largely overlooked Irish army petition, it seeks to remedy an evident disconnect between the respective historiographies of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland on the one hand and the Rump Parliament on the other. The article reconstructs some of the various disputes over religion, authority and violence that undermined the unity of the English wartime regime in Ireland. It then charts the eventual spilling over of these disputes into Westminster politics, arguing that their impact on deteriorating army-parliament relations in the year prior to Oliver Cromwell’s expulsion of the Rump in April 1653 has not been fully appreciated. The key driver of these developments was John Weaver, a republican MP and commissioner for the civil government of Ireland. The article explains how his efforts both to place restraints on the excessive violence of the conquest and to exert civilian control over the military evolved, by 1652, into a determined campaign at Westminster to strengthen the powers of Ireland’s civil government and to limit the army’s share in the prospective Irish land settlement. Weaver’s campaign forced the army officers in Ireland to intervene at Westminster, thus placing increased pressure on the Rump Parliament. This reassessment also enables the early 1650s to be viewed more clearly as a key phase in the operation of the longer-term relationships of mutual influence that existed between Dublin and London in the seventeenth century.

Lay Catholicism and Religious Policy in Cromwellian Ireland

The conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653 created almost as many problems as it solved for the English government of the country. Not least of these was how, if at all, the majority Catholic population was to be won over to Protestantism. This article reassesses Cromwellian religious policy towards the Catholic laity and traces its evolution up to the end of the decade, taking account also of Catholic responses to official measures. It argues that the supposed leniency of government policy has been overstated and that Catholics who refused to conform to Protestantism in fact risked heavy penalties.

Oliver Cromwell and the 'Cromwellian' Settlement of Ireland

Oliver Cromwell remains a deeply controversial figure in Ireland. In the past decade, his role in the conquest has received sustained attention. However, in recent scholarship on the settlement of Ireland in the 1650s, he has enjoyed a peculiarly low profile. This trend has served to compound the interpretative problems relating to Cromwell and Ireland which stem in part from the traditional denominational divide in Irish historiography. This article offers a reappraisal of Cromwell's role in designing and implementing the far-reaching ‘Cromwellian’ land settlement. It examines the evidence relating to his dealings with Irish people, both Protestant and Catholic, and his attitude towards the enormous difficulties which they faced post-conquest. While the massacre at Drogheda in 1649 remains a blot on his reputation, in the 1650s Cromwell in fact emerged as an important and effective ally for Irish landowners seeking to defeat the punitive confiscation and transplantation policies approved by the Westminster parliament and favoured by the Dublin government.

The Transplanters' Certificates and the Historiography of Cromwellian Ireland

This article is concerned with a key source for the transplantation to Connacht known as the 'transplanters' certificates'. It explores how those documents were used and interpreted by scholars both before and after their destruction in 1922 and employs the surviving evidence to reassess their significance.

The Holocene British and Irish ancient woodland fossil beetle fauna: implications for forest history, biodiversity and faunal colonisation

This paper presents a new review of our knowledge of the ancient forest beetle fauna from Holocene archaeological and palaeoecological sites in Great Britain and Ireland. It examines the colonisation, dispersal and decline of beetle species, highlighting the scale and nature of human activities in the shaping of the landscape of the British Isles. In particular, the paper discusses effects upon the insect fauna, and examines in detail the fossil record from the Humberhead Levels, eastern England. It discusses the local extirpation of up to 40 species in Britain and 15 species in Ireland. An evaluation of the timing of extirpations is made, suggesting that many species in Britain disappear from the fossil record between c. 3000 cal BC and 1000 cal BC (c. 5000-3000 cal BP), although some taxa may well have survived until considerably later. In Ireland, there are two distinct trends, with a group of species which seem to be absent after c. 2000 cal BC (c. 4000 cal BP) and a further group which survives until at least as late as the medieval period. The final clearance of the Irish landscape over the last few hundred years was so dramatic, however, that some species which are not especially unusual in a British context were decimated. Reasons behind the extirpation of taxa are examined in detail, and include a combination of forest clearance and human activities, isolation of populations, lack of temporal continuity of habitats, edaphic and competition factors affecting distribution of host trees (particularly pine), lack of forest fires and a decline in open forest systems. The role of climate change in extirpations is also evaluated. Consideration is given to the significance of these specialised ancient forest inhabitants in Ireland in the absence of an early Holocene land-bridge which suggests that colonisation was aided by other mechanisms, such as human activities and wood-rafting. Finally, the paper discusses the Continental origins of the British and Irish fauna and its hosts and the role played by European glacial refugia.

A NOVEL LIFE-HISTORY IN AGLAOTHAMNION-DIAPHANUM-SP NOV (CERAMIACEAE, RHODOPHYTA) FROM BRITTANY AND THE BRITISH-ISLES

A diminutive species of Aglaothamnion (Ceramiaceae, Rhodophyta), A. diaphanum sp. nov., is described from Brittany (Atlantic France), the Isles of Scilly (off S.W. England) and western Ireland. Aglaothamnion diaphanum is confined to the sublittoral zone, where it grows almost exclusively on algae and sessile animals attached to hard substrata. Thalli are delicate, and branched distichously in one plane. The main axes are ecorticate but may form loose non-corticating rhizoidal filaments. The lateral branches bear a characteristic, regularly alternate distichous series of branchlets, the first of which is always adaxial. All vegetative cells are uninucleate. The majority of field-collected plants bear only bisporangia, but a few bisporangial plants also form spermatangia; some male plants and a single female specimen have been collected. The spermatangial branchlets consist of 3-5 spermatangial mother cells each bearing 2-4 spermatangia, which are constricted around a central nucleus. None of the U-shaped carpogonial branches showed any sign of fertilization, and the gametangia appear to be non-functional. The bisporangia are ovoid and contain two uninucleate spores separated by an oblique curved wall. The occurrence of bisporangia and the lack of adherent cortication distinguish A. diaphanum from two similar species, Aglaothamnion bipinnatum (P. Crouan et H. Crouan) Feldmann-Mazoyer and Aglaothamnion decompositum (J. Agardh) Halos. The life history in culture of French and Irish isolates of A. diaphanum consists of a series of bisporangial generations, a single plant of which also formed spermatangia. Apical cells of bisporophytes are haploid (n = c. 32), but the first division of meiosis, with chromosome pairing and crossing over, occurs in dividing bisporocytes. The germinating bispores are haploid. Endodiploidization may occur in the early stages of sporangium development, as in some phycomycete fungi, or in vegetative cells that subsequently give rise to bisporocytes. This is the first demonstration in the red algae of meiotic bisporangia on plants of which the apical cells, at least, are haploid.