Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Philip Mackowiak
It has been said that the only persons who refer to themselves as “we” are royalty, college professors, and those with worms. In the 4 September 2013 issue of the Lancet, Piers Mitchell and colleagues present evidence that Richard III, one of England’s best known medieval kings and the deformed villain of Shakespeare’s Richard III, had two reasons for referring to himself in the first person plural.
By David Blockley
The costly controversy over the abandonment of the ambitious Wear Bridge scheme and current plans by Sunderland City Council to ‘reduce down to a simpler design’ is a manifestation of what can happen when thinking about various forms of art is confounded.
By Lucy Newlyn
Here is one of the poems Dorothy wrote from her sick room. Dated by her as 1836 (and copied out for the Wordsworths’ friend and neighbour Isabella Fenwick in 1839), it gives us some insight into her state of mind as she looked back on a crisis in 1832-3 when her life was in danger.
By Trevor Naylor
The written word has always played its part in the spreading of revolutionary ideas and in the recording of historical events. Until the Internet, this was done principally by the bookshops of the world, nowhere more so than across the countries of Asia and the Middle East, where the humble corner bookshop sells not just books, but newspapers, magazines, stationery, and all manner of things to keep its daily customers up to date.
Between Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in 1887, chance and coincidence played a large part in crime fiction. Conan Doyle resolved to be different in future.
By Alyn Shipton
When Harry Nilsson took a call on 7 September 1978 to tell him that the Who’s drummer Keith Moon had been found dead in Nilsson’s London apartment, it was a shock for two reasons.
By William Doyle
Two hundred and twenty years ago this week, 5 September 1793, saw the official beginning of the Terror in the French Revolution. Ever since that time, it is very largely what the French Revolution has been remembered for. When people think about it, they picture the guillotine in the middle of Paris, surrounded by baying mobs, ruthlessly chopping off the heads of the king, the queen, and innumerable aristocrats for months on end in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity. It was social and political revenge in action. The gory drama of it has proved an irresistible background to writers of fiction, whether Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, or Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novels, or many other depictions on stage and screen. It is probably more from these, rather than more sober historians, that the English-speaking idea of the French Revolution is derived.
On Saturday 7 September 2013, lovers of classical music will gather together once again for the final performance in this year’s momentous Proms season. Alongside the traditional pomp and celebration of the Last Night, with Rule, Britannia!, Jerusalem, and the like, we are promised a number of more substantial works, including Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the overture to Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
By Karen Nelson-Field
Why is it when a new media platform comes along that everything we know about how advertising works and how consumers behave seems to go out the window? Because the race to discovery means that rigorous research with duplicated results are elusive.
By Stephen E. Mawdsley
In 1980, public health researchers working in the United Republic of Cameroon detected a startling trend among children diagnosed with paralytic polio. Some of the children had become paralyzed in the limb that had only weeks before received an inoculation against a common pediatric illness.
By Jennifer Moore
The Geneva Conventions of 1949 do not justify missile strikes in Syria. The humanitarian principle of distinction requires that military force is used without indiscriminately targeting civilians, but does not sanction the use of force itself. International humanitarian law thus governs the conduct of war but not its initiation.
By Sónia Cruz
“Crawling leaves” or “solar-powered sea slugs” are common terms used to name some species of sacoglossan sea slugs capable of performing photosynthesis, a process usually associated with plants. These sea slugs ingest macroalgal tissue and retain undigested functional chloroplasts in special cells of their gut (kleptoplasty). The “stolen” chloroplasts (kleptoplasts) continue to photosynthesize, in some cases up to one year.
By Douglas Bruster
Why should we think that Shakespeare wrote lines first published in the 1602 quarto of The Spanish Tragedy, a then-classic play by his deceased contemporary Thomas Kyd? Our answer starts 180 years ago, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge—author of ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—said he heard Shakespeare in this material.
The historic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 may have buried Pompeii and Herculaneum under a thick carpet of volcanic ash, but it preserved what is surely our most valuable archaeological record of daily life in Ancient Rome to date.
By Gordon R. Thompson
As the summer of 1963 drew to a close and students prepared to return to school, the Beatles released what may have been their most successful single. “She Loves You” would top the British charts twice that year, remain near the top for months, and help to launch the band into the American consciousness.
By Jay Albanese
We’ve divided our planet into nearly 200 countries with sovereign borders and laws designed to preserve mutual self-interest. It is not surprising, therefore, that many countries are suspicious of their cross-border neighbors and sometimes outwardly hostile to them. Simply put, the adage “good fences make good neighbors” applies on the international scene as well.