Barbara Hardy (1924-2016)

This will be a very personal obituary because in losing Barbara I lost one of the profoundest friendships of my life. Her demanding intellectual boldness and buoyant strength of mind were immediately striking. But she also had a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm, a warmth that was evident in the home environment she created: to enter her Earl\u27s Court flat was like entering a Matisse painting - full of colour, oriental carpets, bowls and pots, and paintings by her daughter, Kate. I was lucky enough to experience that warmth and energy less than a week before she died, when I visited her for the last time, though neither of us knew it was to be the last time. I think all the qualities I have described came together in her work. The power and precision of her mind, its largeness and energy and unceasing curiosity, were responsible for a formidable output of criticism and imaginative writing. She was a critic-creator. From the first book, The Novels of George Eliot (1959), through to the last, on Ivy Compton-Burnett, published posthumously this year, 2016, she wrote seventeen major critical books and edited countless collections of essays. Three volumes of poetry, a novel, and an autobiography, and a series of short stories picking up on unanswered questions and loose ends in Victorian novels, are intrinsic to her oeuvre. * And this is not to speak of the energy with which she committed herself to conferences and symposia, travelling all over the world. She organized, latterly with the help of Louise Lee, a series of annual conferences on each of George Eliot\u27s novels at the Institute of English Studies in London. Poignantly, the final conference was on Eliot\u27s last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876)

Review of Form and Feeling in Modern Literature: Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy

Does criticism move in circles and cycles? Perhaps, like a Yeatsian gyre, it progresses by revolving and rotating. If times have changed utterly since the appearance of Barbara Hardy\u27s first book, The Novels of George Eliot (1959), then it is also hard to ignore how some new directions in criticism appear to be rediscovering matters close to this great critic\u27s heart. Form and feeling, certainly, are both back. Professor Hardy used these two unfussy terms to describe, respectively, literature\u27s structured way of happening and its potential to arouse or enrich a reader\u27s felt experience; now, in the more modish guises of the \u27new formalism\u27 and the \u27turn to affect\u27, these same topics can be found being ruminated over at numberless sessions of academic conferences and in special issues of top scholarly journals, on both sides of the Atlantic. This situation is not a case of plus 9a change, plus c\u27est la meme chose but rather an illustration of the unquantifiable influence of Hardy \u27s work and a prompt to reopen her seminal pieces of criticism. As this new volume of essays shows, to celebrate her achievement properly means acknowledging the way it opens itself to the future - the way that, far from aspiring to be a last word on any of the novelists and poets she writes about, her writing seems to invite the possibility of new forms of understanding. In that spirit, it is fitting that the volume\u27s editors and contributors, many of whom studied with Professor Hardy or became her colleagues, mentees, and friends, have themselves gone on to shape how we read Victorian and modern literature. There is consequently a serious ethic of friendship in these pages, and a sense of the way understanding matters most when, in being shared, it overcomes the walls of the individual ego - something that George Eliot would have appreciated. The nature of the gift that Hardy\u27s list of published work represents (and gift seems the appropriate word, given its ethical and affective insistence) is explored in a short. opening section titled \u27Barbara\u27s Work\u27, which features two illuminatingly personal reflections by Isobel Armstrong and Sybil Oldfield. Both essays are characteristically compelling, but especially so for the way they move so deftly between private recollection, Hardy\u27s life and writing, and nineteenth-century literature itself. They form what Oldfield rightly envisages as a \u27conversation\u27 (17), echoing the way L. C. Knights used that term to describe the true task of criticism. William Baker adds a near-comprehensive bibliography of Hardy\u27s works to that conversation, which is a remarkable literary map of its own, not to mention the result of enormous labour, running to almost twenty pages and detailing her numerous conference addresses and public broadcasts as well her many scholarly volumes, critical editions, articles, and books of poems

Bronte's City of Glass

This lecture was originally published by the Institute of English Studies, University of London in 1992. The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lectures were established in 1985 following a donation from Mr Mohamed Aslam in memory of his wife, Dr Hilda Hulme. The lectures are on the subject of English literature and relate to one of ‘the three fields in which Dr Hulme specialised, namely Shakespeare, language in Elizabethan drama, and the nineteenth-century novel’

Nineteenth-Century Popular Science Magazines, Narrative, and the Problem of Historical Materiality

In his Some Reminiscences of a Lecturer, Andrew Wilson emphasizes the importance of narrative to popular science lecturing. Although Wilson promotes the teaching of science as useful knowledge in its own right, he also recognizes that the way science is taught can encourage audiences to take the subject up and read further on their own. Form, according to Wilson, should not be divorced from scientific content and lecturers should ensure that not only is their science accurate, but that it is presented in a way that will provoke curiosity and stimulate interest. This paper discusses the influence of narrative in structuring scientific objects and phenomena, and considers the consequences of such presentations for historical research. As scientific journalism necessarily weaves both its intended audience and the objects under discussion into its accounts, these texts demand that we recognize their nature as social relationships inscribed in historical objects

The Role of CO₂ and Dynamic Vegetation on the Impact of Temperate Land-Use Change in the HadCM3 Coupled Climate Model

Human induced land-use change (LUC) alters the biogeophysical characteristics of the land surface influencing the surface energy balance. The level of atmospheric CO2 is expected to increase in the coming century and beyond, modifying temperature and precipitation patterns and altering the distribution and physiology of natural vegetation. It is important to constrain how CO2-induced climate and vegetation change may influence the regional extent to which LUC alters climate. This sensitivity study uses the HadCM3 coupled climate model under a range of equilibrium forcings to show that the impact of LUC declines under increasing atmospheric CO2, specifically in temperate and boreal regions. A surface energy balance analysis is used to diagnose how these changes occur. In Northern Hemisphere winter this pattern is attributed in part to the decline in winter snow cover and in the summer due to a reduction in latent cooling with higher levels of CO2. The CO2-induced change in natural vegetation distribution is also shown to play a significant role. Simulations run at elevated CO2 yet present day vegetation show a significantly increased sensitivity to LUC, driven in part by an increase in latent cooling. This study shows that modelling the impact of LUC needs to accurately simulate CO2 driven changes in precipitation and snowfall, and incorporate accurate, dynamic vegetation distribution

Field cress genome mapping: Integrating linkage and comparative maps with cytogenetic analysis for rDNA carrying chromosomes

Field cress (Lepidium campestre L.), despite its potential as a sustainable alternative oilseed plant, has been underutilized, and no prior attempts to characterize the genome at the genetic or molecular cytogenetic level have been conducted. Genetic maps are the foundation for anchoring and orienting annotated genome assemblies and positional cloning of candidate genes. Our principal goal was to construct a genetic map using integrated approaches of genetic, comparative and cytogenetic map analyses. In total, 503 F2 interspecific hybrid individuals were genotyped using 7,624 single nucleotide polymorphism markers. Comparative analysis demonstrated that ~57% of the sequenced loci in L. campestre were congruent with Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) genome and suggested a novel karyotype, which predates the ancestral crucifer karyotype. Aceto-orcein chromosome staining and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analyses confirmed that L. campestre, L. heterophyllum Benth. and their hybrids had a chromosome number of 2n = 2x = 16. Flow cytometric analysis revealed that both species possess 2C roughly 0.4 picogram DNA. Integrating linkage and comparative maps with cytogenetic map analyses assigned two linkage groups to their particular chromosomes. Future work could incorporate FISH utilizing A. thaliana mapped BAC clones to allow the chromosomes of field cress to be identified reliably

Comprehensive approach to study branched ubiquitin chains reveals roles for K48-K63 branches in VCP/p97-related processes

Branched ubiquitin (Ub) chains make up a significant proportion of Ub polymers in human cells and are formed when two or more sites on a single Ub molecule are modified with Ub creating bifurcated architectures. Despite their abundance, we have a poor understanding of the cellular functions of branched Ub signals that stems from a lack of facile tools and methods to study them. Here we develop a comprehensive pipeline to define branched Ub function, using K48-K63-branched chains as a case study. We discover branch-specific binders and, by developing a method that monitors cleavage of linkages within complex polyUb, we discover the VCP/p97-associated ATXN3, and MINDY family deubiquitinases to act as debranching enzymes. By engineering and utilizing a branched K48-K63-Ub chain-specific nanobody, we reveal roles for these chains in VCP/p97-related processes. In summary, we provide a blueprint to investigate branched Ub function that can be readily applied to study other branched chain types.<br/

Biochemical characterization of protease activity of Nsp3 from SARS-CoV-2 and its inhibition by nanobodies

Of the 16 non-structural proteins (Nsps) encoded by SARS CoV-2, Nsp3 is the largest and plays important roles in the viral life cycle. Being a large, multidomain, transmembrane protein, Nsp3 has been the most challenging Nsp to characterize. Encoded within Nsp3 is the papain-like protease domain (PLpro) that cleaves not only the viral polypeptide but also K48-linked polyubiquitin and the ubiquitin-like modifier, ISG15, from host cell proteins. We here compare the interactors of PLpro and Nsp3 and find a largely overlapping interactome. Intriguingly, we find that near full length Nsp3 is a more active protease compared to the minimal catalytic domain of PLpro. Using a MALDI-TOF based assay, we screen 1971 approved clinical compounds and identify five compounds that inhibit PLpro with IC50s in the low micromolar range but showed cross reactivity with other human deubiquitinases and had no significant antiviral activity in cellular SARS-CoV-2 infection assays. We therefore looked for alternative methods to block PLpro activity and engineered competitive nanobodies that bind to PLpro at the substrate binding site with nanomolar affinity thus inhibiting the enzyme. Our work highlights the importance of studying Nsp3 and provides tools and valuable insights to investigate Nsp3 biology during the viral infection cycle

Global wealth disparities drive adherence to COVID-safe pathways in head and neck cancer surgery

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