Sir Charles Hanbury Williams and European diplomacy (1747-58)

The subject of this work was originally suggested to me a short time before I graduated. At first my intention was to collect material for a biography of Williams,. but I abandoned this idea almost immediately, and decided to confine my attention to the diplomatic side of his activities. This was the only aspect of his career which really interested me, and there was, as I soon discovered, ample material for its study in the Public Record Office and the MS. Department of the British Museum, where I worked during the first of my postgraduate years.The material collected there during that first year and many later visits to London, after the perusal of hundreds of volumes of letters, despatches, and other private and official papers, forms the basis of this work. It has, however, been supplemented to a considerable extent by the results of two visits to the Archives de la Ministére des Affaires Etrangeres at Paris, and of a visit to the Newport (Mon.) Public Library, which possesses a MS. collection including, so far as can be ascertained, practically all Williams's official papers as a British minister, as well as the private diary which he kept at Berlin and some other private papers. Permission to examine another part of Williams's papers, which is at present in the possession of Mr T.F. Fenwick, Thirlestane House, Cheltenham, was refused.As my knowledge of the authorities and the scope of this study in European diplomacy gradually widened, Williams inevitably ceased to be the central figure, and was merged in the European background. I would gladly dismiss him altogether from my work, but his career is the only thread on which my account of Britain's diplomatic relations with certain continental states can be hung. No one can be more conscious than I of the obvious weakness of the method of treatment which circumstances have forced me to adopt in PartI. As Williams moves about from Dresden to Berlin, Warsaw, Grodno, and Vienna the chapters are necessarily disconnected in their subject matter. This difficulty is not present to the same extent after Williams has settled down at Petersburg, and Part II deals with a single theme - the action and reaction between Petersburg and Europe during the Diplomatic Revolution and the opening of the Seven Years war

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference