Do seed lists have a future?

In the 1960s Taxon published articles aimed at improving botanical Seed Lists. We compared suggestions made then with the situation in 2007. Sadly the majority of problems raised in the original manuscripts were still evident today. Botanic gardens must improve if this practice is to survive.

Daphnane diterpenes of Thymelaea hirsuta

Five 12-hydroxy-daphnane esters were isolated from the leaves and twigs of Egyptian Thymelaea hirsuta. These compounds were identified as gnidicin, gniditrin, genkwadaphnin, the aliphatic C-12 ester, 12-O-heptadecenoyl-5-hydroxy-6,7-epoxy-resiniferonol-9,13,14-orthobenzoate and the novel aliphatic C-12 ester 12-O-butenyl-5-hydroxy-6,7-epoxy-resiniferonol-9,13-14-orthobenzoate.

Entre moralité et politique: l’éducation de Louis XV et la question de l’instruction financière du prince sous l’Ancien Régime

Studies on princely education rarely focus on the training received by future kings to perform one of their key functions – supervising the finances of the monarchy. Failure to address this issue is all the more surprising than one of the major consequences of Louis XIV’s coronation was to grant the king the direction of finances until the French Revolution, thus raising the issue of the financial education of the prince. Based on a largely unpublished body of primary sources, especially several manuscripts specifically written for the financial education of Louis XV and princes in the XVIIIth century, this article explores the teaching approaches and programme of a highly technical nature that the king’s tutors considered essential to the monarch’s duties.

'They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in it': reconsidering the fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest

The complaints on the adoption of Arabic by the Copts that are voiced by the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Samuel have often been quoted as the expiring words of the dying Coptic language. This article seeks to show that they are not to be taken so literally, and that they should rather be inserted in the context of a rift within the medieval Coptic church over the question of language choice, and beyond this, over that of accommodation with the Muslims. The use of Arabic by the episcopal church of Miṣr and by some prominent figures around it, which was linked to their proximity to the Fatimid court, was resented and denounced by more traditional circles, centred on the Patriarchate and on some important monasteries such as the one at Qalamūn where the Apocalypse was written. The suggestion is also made that the text is contemporary with the beginning of Coptic literary production in Arabic and with the introduction of Egyptian Christians at the caliphal court, namely in the last quarter of the tenth century, at the time of Severus ibn al-Muqqafa‘.

From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography (Otto Neurath)

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) wrote From hieroglyphics to Isotype during the last two years of his life and this is the first publication of the text in full, carefully edited from the original manuscripts. He called it a 'visual autobiography', in which he documents the importance of visual material to him from his earliest years to his professional activity with the picture language of Isotype. Neurath draws clear links between the stimulus he received as a boy from illustrated books, toys and exhibitions to the considered work in visual education that occupied him for the last two decades of his life. This engaging and informal account gives a rich picture of Central European culture around the turn of the twentieth century, seen through the eyes of Neurath's insatiable intelligence, as well as a detailed exposition of the technique of Isotype, a milestone of modern graphic design. This edition includes the numerous illustrations intended by Neurath to accompany his text, and is completed by an extensive appendix showing examples from the rich variety of graphic material that he collected.

The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander

The Egyptians mesmerized the ancient Greeks for scores of years. The Greek literature and art of the classical period are especially thick with representations of Egypt and Egyptians. Yet despite numerous firsthand contacts with Egypt, Greek writers constructed their own Egypt, one that differed in significant ways from actual Egyptian history, society, and culture. Informed by recent work on orientalism and colonialism, this book unravels the significance of these misrepresentations of Egypt in the Greek cultural imagination in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Looking in particular at issues of identity, otherness, and cultural anxiety, Phiroze Vasunia shows how Greek authors constructed an image of Egypt that reflected their own attitudes and prejudices about Greece itself. He focuses his discussion on Aeschylus Suppliants; Book 2 of Herodotus; Euripides' Helen; Plato's Phaedrus, Timaeus, and Critias; and Isocrates' Busiris. Reconstructing the history of the bias that informed these writings, Vasunia shows that Egypt in these works was shaped in relation to Greek institutions, values, and ideas on such subjects as gender and sexuality, death, writing, and political and ethnic identity. This study traces the tendentiousness of Greek representations by introducing comparative Egyptian material, thus interrogating the Greek texts and authors from a cross-cultural perspective. A final chapter also considers the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great and shows how he exploited and revised the discursive tradition in his conquest of the country. Firmly and knowledgeably rooted in classical studies and the ancient sources, this study takes a broad look at the issue of cross-cultural exchange in antiquity by framing it within the perspective of contemporary cultural studies. In addition, this provocative and original work shows how Greek writers made possible literary Europe's most persistent and adaptable obsession: the barbarian.

Bioscience Horizons: the national journal of undergraduate research

Bioscience Horizons (BH)commenced publication in 2008 and features research papers and reviews written by graduating UK bioscience students. The journal is run by a consortium of UK universities (the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, Leeds and Chester) in association with Oxford University Press. Its submissions encompass the full range of subjects taught by UK bioscience departments, ranging from agronomy to zoology and including animal behaviour, cancer research, environmental biology, microbial sciences, molecular biology, pharmacolgy, primatology, taxonomy and other areas. BH receives manuscripts from recent graduates (with a bachelor of science or equivalent first degree) describing research carried out during their undergraduate studies, usually as a final-year research project. All submissions undergo expert review and have to meet strict criteria for scientific excellence and originality. Articles are written by a single author and published with the agreement of the graduate's home university department. The journal has an ISSN number and is open-access; articles are freely 'cite-able' contributions to the bioscience research literature.

Interpreting at Vindolanda: commercial and linguistic mediation in the Roman army.

A fragmentary tablet from Vindolanda (Tab. Vindol. II, 213) contains an occurrence of the verb interpretari (‘interpret’, ‘explain’, ‘mediate’) in an apparently commercial context, relating to the grain supply for the Roman fort. This usage is paralleled in a text on a wooden stilus tablet from Frisia in the Netherlands. ‘Interpreters’ and their activities make rather infrequent appearances in the Latin epigraphic and documentary records. In the Danubian provinces, interpreters (interpretes) are attested as army officers and officials in the office of the provincial governor. ‘Interpreters’, in both Latin and Greek inscriptions and papyri, often, however, play more ambiguous roles, not always connected with language-mediation, but also, or instead, with mediation in commercial transactions

The Clitherow manuscript of 'The Destruction of Hierusalem’

This essay discusses the never before seen early modern manuscript of an amateur play called 'The Destruction of Hierusalem' that the author discovered at the London Metropolitan Archives.

Alverata: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic typeface

Alverata: a typeface design for Europe This typeface is a response to the extraordinarily diverse forms of letters of the Latin alphabet in manuscripts and inscriptions in the Romanesque period (c. 1000–1200). While the Romanesque did provide inspiration for architectural lettering in the nineteenth century, these letterforms have not until now been systematically considered and redrawn as a working typeface. The defining characteristic of the Romanesque letterform is variety: within an individual inscription or written text, letters such as A, C, E and G might appear with different forms at each appearance. Some of these forms relate to earlier Roman inscriptional forms and are therefore familiar to us, but others are highly geometric and resemble insular and uncial forms. The research underlying the typeface involved the collection of a large number of references for lettering of this period, from library research and direct on-site ivestigation. This investigation traced the wide dispersal of the Romanesque lettering tradition across the whole of Europe. The variety of letter widths and weights encountered, as well as variant shapes for individual letters, offered both direct models and stylistic inspiration for the characters and for the widths and weight variants of the typeface. The ability of the OpenType format to handle multiple stylistic variants of any one character has been exploited to reflect the multiplicity of forms available to stonecutters and scribes of the period. To make a typeface that functions in a contemporary environment, a lower case has been added, and formal and informal variants supported. The pan-European nature of the Romanesque design tradition has inspired an pan-European approach to the character set of the typeface, allowing for text composition in all European languages, and the typeface has been extended into Greek and Cyrillic, so that the broadest representation of European languages can be achieved.

Boots Book-lovers' Library and the novel: The impact of a circulating library market on twentieth-century fiction

In a Report for the Society of Bookmen in 1928, British publishers estimated that between a quarter to two thirds of all the books they published went to four circulating libraries: Boots, Smith’s, Mudie’s, and The Times bookclub. This essay examines the literary impact of one of the largest of these, Boots Book-lovers’ Library (1899-66), which by 1935 had around 400 libraries attached to their high-street pharmacies catering for the tastes of over one million subscribers a year. Compared to the wealth of studies examining the influence of the library market in the Victorian period, the significance of the subscription libraries as key distributors of fiction in the twentieth century is not well known. But private libraries expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century to cater for what Sidney Dark termed a ‘new reading public’, and records in publishers’ archives indicate that authors routinely adapted their unpublished manuscripts in order to meet the perceived demands of this library reader. This article examines the impact of the Boots Book-lovers’ Library market on authors’ practices of writing and revision, and on literary marketing and censorship. It focuses in particular on the author James Hanley (1897-1985), using unpublished correspondence in the Chatto & Windus archive at the University of Reading to demonstrate how the publisher’s sense of the tastes and expectations of the Boots library reader influenced the editorial process.