… on the World History Blog. (Apologies for running a bit late on the announcement – have been a bit otherwise occupied lately.)

There’s some great stuff there – I was particularly taken by an account of a Swedish land ownership system apparently dependent on the volume of your voice rather than the weight of your wallet. Since I have been called “foghorn” and “fishwife”, it sounds good to me.

(And if you missed it the last one was here on Philobiblon, and not a bad edition if I do say so myself.)

An update for those who have been following the saga: I took Champ back to Battersea Dogs’ Home today. He is a lovely dog, but mine was simply not the right home for him. He needs, I believe, a multi-dog, multi-person household, where he will always have company and won’t overbond with any one person. I did seriously think about getting another dog for him for company, but there was no guarantee it would be enough, and getting a house-husband just to keep the dog company seemed to be going a little far.

All of my attempts to train him to stay on his own – even for five minutes – only succeeded in raising his stress levels. Yesterday I stuffed his Kong (toys that are designed to make getting food a game) with a frozen yoghurt and liver mixture, the yummiest (for a dog!) mixture I could think of. I went out for 20 minutes and he whined and howled the whole time, and did not touch the Kongs.

And such attempts were making him so nervous that he never properly slept during the day, but was always alert to my slightest movement, in case that meant I was going out.

It just was not meant to be. And Battersea will find him the right sort of home, so it is not any sort of tragedy. I’m trying to maintain a sense of proportion.

Are we, as patients and societies, ready to accept that there is no “perfect cure” in medicine – that any drug, any treatment has risks and costs as well as benefits, so complex is the physiology of the biological body?

Probably not, I suspect, given the furores over vaccines, over adverse reactions to drugs etc.

The problem is that the issues are terribly complex (and I do mean that description).

These thoughts were provoked by a study that found one in ten treatments for breast cancer after screening discovers abnormalities are probably unnecessary.

Some cancers that would probably not have caused any harm during a woman’s lifetime are being picked up by rigorous screening.
While screening reduces the death rate, over-diagnosis is inevitable in a programme that is designed to catch breast cancers early. But the scale of over-diagnosis has not been known and estimates have varied from 1% to 54%.

***
On the straight politics side, Menzies Campbell is said to be going to take the Liberal Democrats to the right. Excellent – more space for the Greens!
And Patience Wheatcroft in The Times has an interesting piece on Labour’s cronyism and astonishing faith in businessmen with less than stellar records. There does seem to be a sociological effect, that Labour governments (Not just Blair, although he does seem to be a particular problem) fall swooning at the feet of businessmen.

Condoleezza Rice has released an exercise video – no, not quite like Jane Fonda; it has been interpretted as a sign that she is trying to make herself look more “human” with a presidential, or vice-presidential, race in mind.

The US Secretary of State has invited cameras into her departmental gym to record how she squeezes fitness training into her busy schedule. NBC began broadcasting the three-part series yesterday, featuring a warm-up of “easy spinning” on an exercise bike followed by shots of her abdominal routine. Today, breathless (not to mention sweaty) viewers will be told about “the one time her weight got out of control — and what she did about it”.
Friends say her svelte conditioning is down to a good diet as much as exercise. “She’s not a puritan type who lives off one lettuce leaf a day by any means,” said one, “but she eats sensibly.” So she must, given a job which entails diplomatic dinners most days of the week.

Certainly sounds like a political run in the modern era to me.
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There’s not too many signs of spring in London now (today it was, for the second day in a row, quite seriously snowing at the same time as the sun was out – not something I’ve seen before) but when it does arrive it seems a Bronze Age “clock” could tell us.

THE ENIGMA of a priceless Bronze Age disc seems to have been solved by a Hamburg scientist who has identified it as one of the world’s first astronomical clocks.
The 3,600-year-old Sky Disc of Nebra, which surfaced four years ago when German grave robbers tried to sell it on the international market, shows that Bronze Age man had a sophisticated sense of time.
Ralph Hansen, an astronomer in Hamburg, found that the disc was an attempt to co-ordinate the solar and lunar calendars. It was almost certainly a highly accurate timekeeper that told Bronze Age Man when to plant seeds and when to make trades, giving him an almost modern sense of time.

Also in the exhibition that opens today at the National Portrait Gallery:

* A letter from Edward Alleyn to his wife of one year, Joan, from 1593:
It starts: “to my good sweet mouse” and includes suggestions of precautions to take against the plague, a request to sow spinach in the garden, and to dye his orange stockings black for winter.

* A list of the apparel belonging to the Lord Admiral’s Men (compiled also by Edward) in 1602 – very long and complicated.

* The first royal patent for the Kings’ Men, dated 19 May 1603, that states the company exists not only for the pleasure of the king, but also for “the recreation of our lovinge subjectes”.

*A portrait of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is playfully included, with the note that in the 1920s he was championed as the real author of Shakespeare’s plays.

* One woman gets a look in – with a miniature that is (probably) of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, by Nicholas Hilliard.

* The diary of Simon Forman – open at the page recording his account of seeing The Winter’s Tale.

* A script in progress for The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore (sic). About 140 lines are reported to be attributed to Shakespeare, but there are six different hands identified in the text.

Walking into Searching for Shakespeare, the exhibition that opens tomorrow at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I took a wrong turn. Someone was standing in front of the “exhibition this way” sign, so I forged straight ahead, and was puzzled to be confronted by a sword, a workmanlike rapier with just a hint of gentlemanly damascene decoration. The label explained: “On formal occasions and at court Shakespeare would have worn a sword, and in his will in 1616 he left it to a friend from Stratford-upon-Avon called Thomas Coombe. This example from the period …” So, a hint, a flavour of his age, but not really Shakespeare.

Turning around, I went back to the beginning, and found another absence. On a perspex stand is a wonderful fancy, and very warm-looking hat, from the 16th-century, an astonishing survival and fascinating, but again, not Shakespeare’s (what would it be worth if it were?), but one like he “might have worn”.

Yet next, in front of you, are some real signs that, as though scrawled by some graffitist on the wall, “Shakespeare was here”. There are the papers that he touched, that recorded his life before he was “the Bard” and was just a young lad from Stratford-upon-Avon . There’s the parish register from Holy Trinity Church, open at the entry for the baptism on May 26, 1583, of his first child, Susanna. It sits beside the bond recording his marriage, just five months before. They are mute but eloquent witnesses to the reason why a lad of 18 would be marrying a woman of 26. By the standards of the time she was about the right age for marriage, but he was certainly not; you can just imagine the matrons of the town tutting, saying: “He’s ruined his life.”

The end of that life – the dead Shakespeare if you like – is also here, in the will that famously left most of his wealth to that oldest child, Susanna, and only his “second best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway. But, as Tarnya Cooper, the exhibition curator, explains, that can’t be taken for the slight that it seems to be. Wives by law received a third of their husband’s wealth for their use, and it is not uncommonly for them to be left out of the bequests in consequence. This will is nonetheless an oh-so-human document, Lines are crossed out, words inserted – there was, on this death bed, no time to make a fair copy.

So we’ve found the young son of a glove-maker, and the old man on his death-bed in Stratford-upon-Avon. But these are not The Bard – the star of London’s great Tudor flowering … READ MORE