Review of "Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, British Library Additional MS 71158" by Knight

Tulloch's review of "Robin Hood: The Forresters Manuscript, British Library Additional MS 71158" edited by Stephen Knight (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998)

Review of "From Galt to Douglas Brown: Nineteenth Century Fiction and Scots Language" by Letley

Tulloch's review of Emma Letley's book "From Galt to Douglas Brown, Nineteenth Century Fiction and Scots Language" (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988)

Imagery in "The Highland Widow"

The overt central theme of Scott's "Highland Widow" is obvious enough and generally agreed on. The story deals with the passing of the old Highland values of those who 'esteemed it shame to want anything that could be had for the taking' and the imposition of new 'civilised' values appropriate to a 'settled government of laws, that protect the property of the weak against the incursions of the strong'. How then are we meant to feel about this story from the past? One possible way to examine some of the issues at stake is to look at the imagery. There is a persistent strain throughout the story of imagery of the natural world: animals, birds, hills, clouds. An examination of how these images are used provides us with some interesting hints as to how we should respond to the events and characters

Robert Garioch's Different Styles of Scots

In 1977 Robert Garioch was asked by Duncan Glen, as editor of 'Akros', to describe his poetic language. He did so very succinctly; "My language is my native local Scots, plus words and expressions of any other date or provenance, from speech, dictionaries and books: I follow the practice of most writers in Scots, at least since they became self-conscious sometime about the eighteenth century. Latterly I have been inclined to spell less phonetically, assuming, e.g. that a reader will not usually pronounce the final letters of 'and' and 'of'. Also I use Scots of different styles for different purposes, and try to use it as any writer would use any language." This description is very helpful and what this paper aims to do is largely to flesh out these comments with details. In particular it takes up Garioch's comment that he used "Scots of different styles for different purposes". Indeed, the whole question of his language will be examined from this particular angle

Review of "The Days of the Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656-1716" by Marshall

Tulloch's review of Rosalind K. Marshall's book "The Days of the Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656-1716" (Phantassie, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000)

Review of "Anecdotes of Scott" by Hogg and Rubenstein

reviewTulloch's review of Jill Rubenstein's edition of "Anecdotes of Scott" by James Hogg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999)

Review of "Ivanhoe" edited by Duncan

Tulloch's review of the World's Classics edition of "Ivanhoe" edited by Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Ten-year mortality, disease progression, and treatment-related side effects in men with localised prostate cancer from the ProtecT randomised controlled trial according to treatment received

Background The ProtecT trial reported intention-to-treat analysis of men with localised prostate cancer randomly allocated to active monitoring (AM), radical prostatectomy, and external beam radiotherapy. Objective To report outcomes according to treatment received in men in randomised and treatment choice cohorts. Design, setting, and participants This study focuses on secondary care. Men with clinically localised prostate cancer at one of nine UK centres were invited to participate in the treatment trial comparing AM, radical prostatectomy, and radiotherapy. Intervention Two cohorts included 1643 men who agreed to be randomised and 997 who declined randomisation and chose treatment. Outcome measurements and statistical analysis Analysis was carried out to assess mortality, metastasis and progression and health-related quality of life impacts on urinary, bowel, and sexual function using patient-reported outcome measures. Analysis was based on comparisons between groups defined by treatment received for both randomised and treatment choice cohorts in turn, with pooled estimates of intervention effect obtained using meta-analysis. Differences were estimated with adjustment for known prognostic factors using propensity scores. Results and limitations According to treatment received, more men receiving AM died of PCa (AM 1.85%, surgery 0.67%, radiotherapy 0.73%), whilst this difference remained consistent with chance in the randomised cohort (p = 0.08); stronger evidence was found in the exploratory analyses (randomised plus choice cohort) when AM was compared with the combined radical treatment group (p = 0.003). There was also strong evidence that metastasis (AM 5.6%, surgery 2.4%, radiotherapy 2.7%) and disease progression (AM 20.35%, surgery 5.87%, radiotherapy 6.62%) were more common in the AM group. Compared with AM, there were higher risks of sexual dysfunction (95% at 6 mo) and urinary incontinence (55% at 6 mo) after surgery, and of sexual dysfunction (88% at 6 mo) and bowel dysfunction (5% at 6 mo) after radiotherapy. The key limitations are the potential for bias when comparing groups defined by treatment received and changes in the protocol for AM during the lengthy follow-up required in trials of screen-detected PCa. Conclusions Analyses according to treatment received showed increased rates of disease-related events and lower rates of patient-reported harms in men managed by AM compared with men managed by radical treatment, and stronger evidence of greater PCa mortality in the AM group. Patient summary More than 95 out of every 100 men with low or intermediate risk localised prostate cancer do not die of prostate cancer within 10 yr, irrespective of whether treatment is by means of monitoring, surgery, or radiotherapy. Side effects on sexual and bladder function are better after active monitoring, but the risks of spreading of prostate cancer are more common

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio