9 research outputs found
Figure 2 from: Villet MH, Clitheroe C, Williams KA (2017) The temporal occurrence of flesh flies (Diptera, Sarcophagidae) at carrion-baited traps in Grahamstown, South Africa. African Invertebrates 58(1): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.3897/AfrInvertebr.58.9537
No full textFigure 2 -
Occurrence of males of six species of flesh fly collected commonly at carrion-baited traps. A Sarcophaga africa B Sarcophaga inaequalis C Sarcophaga exuberans D Sarcophaga tibialis E Sarcophaga hera F Sarcophaga arno. The frequencies at each date are composed of subtotals from the three sites (Sites 5, 6, and 8) described in Table 1
Figure 2 from: Villet MH, Clitheroe C, Williams KA (2017) The temporal occurrence of flesh flies (Diptera, Sarcophagidae) at carrion-baited traps in Grahamstown, South Africa. African Invertebrates 58(1): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.3897/AfrInvertebr.58.9537
No full textThe temporal occurrence of flesh flies (Diptera, Sarcophagidae) at carrion-baited traps in Grahamstown, South Africa
Get PDFEleven species of flesh fly were identified in a sample of 737 specimens captured during fortnightly trapping at three sites in Grahamstown, South Africa, over a year. Sarcophaga africa Wiedemann, 1824, S. inaequalis Austen, 1909, S. exuberans Pandellé, 1896 and S. tibialis Macquart, 1851 showed well-defined peaks between early October 2001 and late April 2002, and only S. africa was trapped at other times of year. These peaks occurred when average minimum and maximum ambient air temperatures were above 12°C and 22°C, respectively, and showed no obvious relationship to rainfall. There were indications of population cycles in all of these species. Sarcophaga hera Zumpt, 1972, S. arno Curran, 1934, S. inzi Curran, 1934, S. langi Curran, 1934, S. freyi Zumpt, 1953, S. nodosa Engel, 1925 and S. samia Curran, 1934 were too scarce to assess their patterns of occurrence rigorously. Insects attending a corpse are reputed to assist forensic entomologists in estimating the time of year when the body died. Some flesh flies provide more precise estimates than others, so several species should be used for cross-validation. Insect activity at a corpse depends on the weather, so that presence of a species indicates particular environmental conditions and not simply calendar dates (particularly if climate changes). Absence of a species is not necessarily evidence of specific conditions because species may not be present at all sites simultaneously, populations cycle even when their members are active, and low population densities may hamper detection of a species
Walder, (Alan) David, (13 Nov. 1928–26 Oct. 1978), MP (C) Clitheroe since 1970; Barrister and Author
No full textBetween the Brain and the Word: Metaphysics and Comedy
No full textSteve Sayles’s Charlie’s Problem: He Has Had a Falling Out with His Brain occupies a singular position in contemporary British literature. Beneath its surface of dialect humour and anecdotal absurdity, it conceals an intricate metaphysical structure. Sayles—known academically as S. C. Sayles for his Veritas Confirmata and The Recovery of the Soul series—transposes the philosophical concerns of his rational, field-centred ontology into a register of cultural comedy.
The book’s titular hero, Charlie Clitheroe, embodies the philosophical everyman who quarrels with his own mind. Through stories such as “The Flipping Brain,” “Two Bummed Tingled,” “Stonker Raisen Was Here,” and “Climb Like Monkeys,” Sayles constructs a comic phenomenology of consciousness, exploring trust, error, guilt, and humane clarity.
This review reads Charlie’s Problem as both literary artifact and philosophical experiment. It argues that Sayles’s humour functions not merely as entertainment but as epistemology: laughter becomes a medium for metaphysical inquiry. Blending the tonal warmth of Northern English storytelling with the logical precision of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Sayles demonstrates that comedy can illuminate the same ontological tensions that academic philosophy treats with solemnity.
The following analysis situates Charlie’s Problem within traditions of British working-class wit and existential satire, showing how its author converts folly into insight and everyday speech into a language of metaphysical confession.
Introduction
When Charlie’s Problem opens with the declaration that its protagonist has “had a falling out with his brain,” the reader is immediately warned that the battleground will not be the streets of Doncaster but the corridors of consciousness. What appears to be a collection of comic sketches soon reveals itself as a philosophical anatomy of the modern self. Sayles’s humour—earthy, self-mocking, and colloquially precise—serves as the instrument by which deep metaphysical questions are rendered audible in the cadences of ordinary life.
In the landscape of British letters, Sayles’s work belongs to a lineage stretching from Laurence Sterne’s playful epistemologies to Alan Bennett’s moral ironies. Yet its deeper ancestry lies with Wittgenstein’s insight that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Sayles, who elsewhere writes systematic metaphysics under the name S. C. Sayles, takes this aphorism literally. His comedy is not ornament to philosophy but philosophy’s embodiment in dialect and story. Charlie’s Problem transforms the comic anecdote into a metaphysical laboratory where ideas about mind, language, and moral order are tested through laughter.
The book presents itself modestly: a sequence of loosely connected tales, each accompanied by its own “Philosophical Analysis.” Yet this self-commentary is integral to the design. It recalls the structure of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which propositions are followed by clarifying sub-propositions. Sayles extends the same scaffolding to narrative form: first the event, then the reflection. The humour triggers thought, and the analysis formalises it. Through this rhythm of anecdote and exposition, Charlie’s Problem proposes that comedy itself may be the truest mode of philosophy in an age that no longer trusts solemnity.
Set within recognisably Northern social worlds—pit villages, schoolyards, pubs, and seaside escapades—the stories celebrate the oral texture of working-class speech. Sayles preserves the idiom of the people he portrays, collecting dialect terms such as gormwazzock, twizzleheed, and dunderplank in “The Idiot’s Lexicon.” The glossary is more than linguistic play; it functions as anthropology of the comic mind, mapping the vocabulary of foolishness that underwrites all human self-knowledge. In Charlie’s Problem, every insult conceals an ethic of leniency: to call oneself a fool is to acknowledge participation in the universal comedy of error.
The thematic core of the book lies in the dialectic between intellect and instinct—between the brain that calculates and the intuition that orientates. Charlie’s “falling out” with his brain becomes a microcosm of modernity’s estrangement from itself. The Freudian, Cartesian, and tribal models of mind parodied in “The Flipping Brain” dramatise the confusion between the biological and the metaphysical, the mechanical and the moral. Sayles’s prose renders this ancient dualism in domestic absurdity: the self arguing with its own organ, the thinker unable to trust the instrument of thought.
To interpret Charlie’s Problem only as humour would therefore be to miss its philosophical ambition. Beneath its laughter runs a meditation on knowledge, culpability, and repair. The book’s recurring moral insight is that folly is not the opposite of wisdom but its apprenticeship. Each episode ends not with despair but with restoration through laughter—the recognition that self-exposure, however embarrassing, is the first step toward truth
Between the Brain and the Word: Metaphysics and Comedy
Get PDFSteve Sayles’s Charlie’s Problem: He Has Had a Falling Out with His Brain occupies a singular position in contemporary British literature. Beneath its surface of dialect humour and anecdotal absurdity, it conceals an intricate metaphysical structure. Sayles—known academically as S. C. Sayles for his Veritas Confirmata and The Recovery of the Soul series—transposes the philosophical concerns of his rational, field-centred ontology into a register of cultural comedy.
The book’s titular hero, Charlie Clitheroe, embodies the philosophical everyman who quarrels with his own mind. Through stories such as “The Flipping Brain,” “Two Bummed Tingled,” “Stonker Raisen Was Here,” and “Climb Like Monkeys,” Sayles constructs a comic phenomenology of consciousness, exploring trust, error, guilt, and humane clarity.
This review reads Charlie’s Problem as both literary artifact and philosophical experiment. It argues that Sayles’s humour functions not merely as entertainment but as epistemology: laughter becomes a medium for metaphysical inquiry. Blending the tonal warmth of Northern English storytelling with the logical precision of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Sayles demonstrates that comedy can illuminate the same ontological tensions that academic philosophy treats with solemnity.
The following analysis situates Charlie’s Problem within traditions of British working-class wit and existential satire, showing how its author converts folly into insight and everyday speech into a language of metaphysical confession.
Introduction
When Charlie’s Problem opens with the declaration that its protagonist has “had a falling out with his brain,” the reader is immediately warned that the battleground will not be the streets of Doncaster but the corridors of consciousness. What appears to be a collection of comic sketches soon reveals itself as a philosophical anatomy of the modern self. Sayles’s humour—earthy, self-mocking, and colloquially precise—serves as the instrument by which deep metaphysical questions are rendered audible in the cadences of ordinary life.
In the landscape of British letters, Sayles’s work belongs to a lineage stretching from Laurence Sterne’s playful epistemologies to Alan Bennett’s moral ironies. Yet its deeper ancestry lies with Wittgenstein’s insight that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Sayles, who elsewhere writes systematic metaphysics under the name S. C. Sayles, takes this aphorism literally. His comedy is not ornament to philosophy but philosophy’s embodiment in dialect and story. Charlie’s Problem transforms the comic anecdote into a metaphysical laboratory where ideas about mind, language, and moral order are tested through laughter.
The book presents itself modestly: a sequence of loosely connected tales, each accompanied by its own “Philosophical Analysis.” Yet this self-commentary is integral to the design. It recalls the structure of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which propositions are followed by clarifying sub-propositions. Sayles extends the same scaffolding to narrative form: first the event, then the reflection. The humour triggers thought, and the analysis formalises it. Through this rhythm of anecdote and exposition, Charlie’s Problem proposes that comedy itself may be the truest mode of philosophy in an age that no longer trusts solemnity.
Set within recognisably Northern social worlds—pit villages, schoolyards, pubs, and seaside escapades—the stories celebrate the oral texture of working-class speech. Sayles preserves the idiom of the people he portrays, collecting dialect terms such as gormwazzock, twizzleheed, and dunderplank in “The Idiot’s Lexicon.” The glossary is more than linguistic play; it functions as anthropology of the comic mind, mapping the vocabulary of foolishness that underwrites all human self-knowledge. In Charlie’s Problem, every insult conceals an ethic of leniency: to call oneself a fool is to acknowledge participation in the universal comedy of error.
The thematic core of the book lies in the dialectic between intellect and instinct—between the brain that calculates and the intuition that orientates. Charlie’s “falling out” with his brain becomes a microcosm of modernity’s estrangement from itself. The Freudian, Cartesian, and tribal models of mind parodied in “The Flipping Brain” dramatise the confusion between the biological and the metaphysical, the mechanical and the moral. Sayles’s prose renders this ancient dualism in domestic absurdity: the self arguing with its own organ, the thinker unable to trust the instrument of thought.
To interpret Charlie’s Problem only as humour would therefore be to miss its philosophical ambition. Beneath its laughter runs a meditation on knowledge, culpability, and repair. The book’s recurring moral insight is that folly is not the opposite of wisdom but its apprenticeship. Each episode ends not with despair but with restoration through laughter—the recognition that self-exposure, however embarrassing, is the first step toward truth
Richard Cobden, educationist, economist and statesman.
Get PDFThe aim of the thesis is to show that Richard Cobden
(1804-1865) deserves to be given a significant place in
the history of political, economic and social thought and
also full credit for a range of statesmanship which went
far beyond his well known part in the repeal of the Corn
Laws and the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860.
Historians have not sufficiently recognised that Cobden
sought to make fundamental changes in British society and
that he tried to initiate them by piecemeal constitutional
methods. He also believed that the British example would
have a powerful influence on other countries and thus
contribute to a new world order.
Cobden had a coherent, although unsystematised,
philosophy, based on certain major assumptions. They were,
firstly, that social progress depends on the interaction
of economic, moral and religious and educational factors;
secondly that progress towards a real political democracy
depends on progress in the former areas. A special problem
in explaining Cobden's philosophy is the fact that the
ideas of two important thinkers with whom he was associated,
George Combe (1788-1858), phrenologist (psychologist) and
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), economist, have been belittled
and neglected since Cobden's death. Therefore, the analysis of Cobden's thought necessitated an effort to "rehabilitate't these two thinkers.
Cobden's efforts to transform British politics and society were only partially successful in Britain's
adoption of free trade, a policy not properly understood
by most statesmen and commercial men. His work for
common schools, international schools, lyceums and
educative popular newspapers was a failure and soon
forgotten; his efforts to reform British foreign policy
and implement arms control also failed. After his death,
his followers failed to develop satisfactorily his ideas
for application to social and international problems. These
ideas still have considerable potential
A global assessment of microplastic abundance and characteristics on marine turtle nesting beaches.
No full textSandy coastal beaches are an important nesting habitat for marine turtles and a known sink for plastic pollution. Existing methodologies for monitoring the spatiotemporal patterns of abundance and composition of plastic are, however, disparate. We engaged a global network of marine turtle scientists to implement a large-scale sampling effort to assess microplastic abundance in beach sediments on marine turtle nesting beaches. Sand samples were collected from 209 sites spanning six oceans, microplastics (1-5 mm) were extracted through stacked sieves, visually identified, and a sub-sample verified via Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. Microplastics were detected in 45 % (n = 94) of beaches and within five ocean basins. Microplastic presence and abundance was found to vary markedly within and among ocean basins, with the highest proportion of contaminated beaches found in the Mediterranean (80 %). We present all data in an accessible, open access format to facilitate the extension of monitoring efforts and empower novel analytical approaches.The authors thank the UK Global Challenges Resource Fund (GCRF) (Grant number: NE/V005448/1) and the Natural Environment Research Council (Grant number: NE/V009354/1) which has enabled this international collaboration. We also thank and are grateful to everyone who assisted in the collection and shipment of the samples. We thank Dr. Jennifer Lynch from the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) for collecting and processing of the Hawaiian beach samples. José C. Báez was financially supported by the project ‘Plan Complementario de I + D + i en el área de Biodiversidad (PCBIO),’ funded by the European Union within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan – NextGenerationEU, by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and by the Regional Government of Andalusia. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. The manuscript was improved as a result of the input of the editor and two anonymous reviewers
Embroidered rhetoric: the social, religious and political functions of elite women's needlework, c.1560-1630
Get PDFThis thesis focuses on the Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocracy and upper gentry to yield the first detailed study of the elite needleworking woman as fashioner of her social personage, and of the objects she produced as indices of social persona, religious conscience and political agency.
The first chapter explores how needlework mediates between wtiwomeann d their social context. It surveys the way in which needlework, both as practice and as object, functioned as a vehicle for projecting persona and personage into a social context which interpreted needlework according to complex value systems of personal virtue and the husbandries of conspicuous wealth. The chapter explores needlework as a site for intellectual expression. The theories developed in the first chapter are tested in a case study of Bess of Hardwick, whose textiles show her construction of a virtuous aristocratic persona proclaiming its self-assured place in the social hierarchy.
Chapter Two is the first study to consider the needlework of Elizabethan and Jacobean Catholics in the light of the Protestant proscription of iconic vestments. It recovers the history of lost needlework from English convents on the Continent, and of the English recusants' covert provision of vestments to Jesuit missioners. The first detailed case studs' of Helena Wintour's vestments reads Wintour's Jesuit-influenced Marian floral emblems and iconography alongside Hawkins's meditation handbook Partheneia Sacra to theorise Wintour's devotion to the Immaculate Conception, and explores the vestments' relationship to the liturgy and their iconographical importance to the Mass.
Chapter Three considers needlework gifts as political currency within patronage structures at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. Narrated with a contemporary vocabulary of grace, needlework gifts contribute to the construction of court-crown relations, symbolised by needlework gifts in Jacobean court masques. Through needlework gifts a `feminine commonwealth' availed itself of power structures at the court of James's consort that parallel his departments, and the women's political agency in a female political hierarchy is seen encoded within gifts of needlework in the Queen's Courts final masque. The case study uses Mary's needlework gifts to Elizabeth as an index of changes in their relationship. Mary's needlework joins parallel texts such as poetry, portraiture and planned masques in developing an iconographical vocabulary centring on the Judgement of Paris, with which diplomatic negotiations sought to clarify the Queens' relative positions
