Very sad news arrived today of the death at the age of 96 of the wonderful Patricia Routledge. I guess she is best known for her portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances, but to me she will always be Kitty in Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV back in the 1980s. She did many other things besides, but here by way of a tribute is an example of Kitty holding forth as was her wont (although usually not in inebriated fashion). Cheadle just won’t be the same without her.
Today is National Poetry Day in the UK and Ireland but, instead of posting a poem like I usually do on this occasion, I thought I’d do a bit of reflecting on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. What prompted this is an article in the Times Literary Supplement I mentioned in a post on Monday. The cover picture shows a newly-discovered miniature by Nicholas Hilliard that is claimed to be of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and patron of William Shakespeare:
On the 20th May 1609, a collection of 154 Sonnets by William Shakespeare was published, which arguably represents at least as high a level of literary achievement as his plays. The “Master Mistress” in the title of the TLS article is a reference to Sonnet No. 20 in the collection, published on 20th May 1609, of 154 Sonnets by William Shakespeare, which arguably represents at least as high a level of literary achievement as his plays. Here is Sonnet No. 20 in the form usually printed nowadays:
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted, Hast thou the master mistress of my passion, A woman’s gentle heart but not acquainted With shifting change as is false women’s fashion, An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling: Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth, A man in hue all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
The somewhat androgynous facial appearance of Henry Wriothesley – seen in other portraits – has led some to suggest that the above Sonnet was addressed to him. Others think that the poem was addressed to a young male actor (a “boy player“) who played female roles on the stage, as was usual in Shakespeare’s time. It was illegal for women to perform on stage until 1660.
The dedication in the First Folio edition of the Sonnets, published in 1609, is shown on the left. The initials “T.T.” are accepted to stand for the name of the publisher Thomas Thorpe but the identity of “Mr. W.H.” is unknown. Of course “W.H.” is a reversal of the “H.W. ” that could be Henry Wriothesley, but would the publisher really use “Mr” to refer to a member of the nobility? Another curiosity is the prevalence of full stops, which is more characteristic of inscriptions carved in stone than on printed pages.
The First Folio edition was the only edition of the Sonnets published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the circumstances of its publication remain uncertain to this day and not only because of identity of “Mr W.H.” For example, if it was authorised by Shakespeare, why did Shakespeare himself not write the dedication? Some have argued that it must have been published posthumously, so Shakespeare must have been dead in 1609, whereas most sources say he died in 1616.
Most of the poems (126 out of 154) contain poetic statements of love for a young man, often called the “Fair Youth”. However, there is also a group of sonnets addressed to the poet’s mistress, an anonymous “dark lady”, which are far much more sexual in content than those addressed to the “Fair Youth”. The usual interpretation of this is that the poet’s love for the boy was purely Platonic rather than sexual in nature. If Mr W.H. was a boy player then he would have been very young indeed, i.e. 13-17 years old…
Anyway, it was certainly a physical attraction: verse after verse speaks of the young man’s beauty. The first group of sonnets even encourage him to get married and have children so his beauty can continue and not die with his death. Sonnet 20 laments that the youth is not a woman, suggesting that this ruled out any sexual contact. These early poems seem to suggest a slightly distant relationship between the two as if they didn’t really know each other well. However, as the collection goes on the poems become more and more intimate and it’s hard for me to accept that there wasn’t some sort of involvement between the two. Although homosexual relationships were not officially tolerated in 17th Century England, they were not all that rare especially in the theatrical circles in which Shakespeare worked.
Oscar Wilde wrote a story called “A Portrait of Mr. W.H.” which suggests he is a young actor by the name of “Will Hughes”. The main evidence for this is Sonnet 20.
Look at the First Folio version:
The initial capital and emphasis of “Hews” seen in line 7 is very unusual and suggests that it is a joke (one of many in this poem), in the form of a pun on the preceding “hew”. It is suggested that “Hews” is actually “Hughes”. Ingenious, but I’m not convinced. There were many other meanings of “hew” in use in Shakespeare’s time; it was a variant spelling of “ewe” for example.
We’ll probably never know who Mr W.H. was – presumably not Smith – or indeed what was the real nature of his relationship to Shakespeare but we do not need to know that to read and enjoy the poems.
I do have a fundamental misgiving, though, about the assumption that the “Onlie begetter” of these sonnets means the person to whom they are addressed, or who inspired them. That assumption entirely disregards the “Dark Lady” sequence. There are at least two addressees so neither can be the only begetter, if that is what begetter is supposed to mean.
I think it more likely Mr W.H., whoever he was, is the person who caused the collection to be created and/or published, perhaps by sponsoring the First Folio. It’s also possible that these poems may have been commissioned over the years by Mr. W.H. and/or others – experts think they were written over a period of at least 16 years – and only published together at much later date. It is indeed said that some of verses were circulated in private well before they were published, though they may perhaps have been edited or otherwise tidied up for the 1609 edition. Perhaps Shakespeare supplemented his income by writing sonnets to order?
This line of thought also took me to another question: why does everyone assume that all 126 of the “Fair Youth” sonnets are about the same person? That person is never named and only occasionally described. Some of the 126 are thematically linked, but overall it is a collection rather than a sequence. Some are humorous and some are very serious indeed. Some are downright cryptic. I think it quite possible, especially if the poems really were written over a period of 16 years, that they not all addressed to the same individual. Once you accept the evident truth that there is more than one recipient, then why not more than two?
Some have taken this even further and asked: do we really know that all 154 sonnets were written by the same person? The same question is asked about Shakespeare’s work generally. Was there really one person behind his plays, or were they collaborative efforts.
Finally, I wonder for what purpose these sonnets were written. Were they actually sent to the addressee(s) as expressions of love, like letters, or were they private meditations, like one might write in a journal?
I don’t suppose we’ll ever really know the answers to these questions, but I find it fascinating that the origin of such a famous collection is enshrouded in so many mysteries! I promise to post more of them here in due course.
To pre-empt accusations that this is a misleading representation of the true state of affairs, I admit this is so. In a more accurate version there would be many more members of the Senior Management Team. Moreover, the President and Senior Management Team appear in the photo to be aware of, and some are even showing some interesting in, the activity of the lecturer.
A while ago I went to a concert that featured a Mozart Piano concerto with soloist David Fray. I mentioned then that his encore was a piece by Johannn Sebastian Bach, arranged for piano. I thought I’d post a performance of the same piece today.
Originally the second movement “Air” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, this piece became known as the Air on the G string when it was arranged for solo violin and orchestra, by August Wilhelmj, which involved transposing it down from D Major to C Major so that the violin part could be played entirely on the lowest of the four strings. It’s also sometimes called the (and sometimes “Celebrated Air”, which is more appropriate when it is played on anything other than a violin. The piano version performed by David Fray was arranged by Alexander Siloti and I think it’s very beautiful, based on a beautifully simple bass. Bach’s keyboard pieces often have a left-hand part which is interesting on its own. You can also see hear why jazz musician’s like Bach so much; the left hand provides such a steady but rich foundation for improvisation with the right hand.
Anyway, here is a nice performance of the same piece, at a gently swinging tempo, not unlike a slow blues, by Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa.
One of the Youtube commenters calls this version “melancholy”, which I don’t agree with at all! Whatever it is, it’s a nice way to spend 5 or 6 minutes relaxing in between lectures.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have a habit of reading the Times Literary Supplement which I buy not only for the book reviews, but also for its excellent crossword. I’ve even won the crossword competition prize a few times. You can find an assortment of posts related to the TLShere.
Recently the Times Literary Supplement underwent something of a makeover, changing the design and switching from a weekly to fortnightly publication. The first new-style issue was published on September 5th. Here is the cover:
The cover article is about the possible identity of the “Mr W.H.” to whom William Shakespeare dedicated his collection of Sonnets; see here. I may write something about that in the not too distant future, as I’ve been reading these again recently.
Anyway, my subscription definitely specifies a “weekly print edition delivered to my door”, so that has gone out the window. I wasn’t best pleased to have the terms of my subscription changed unilaterally like that. Of course I could just read the online edition, but I don’t like reading too much on a screen. I’ve never adapted to reading books on a Kindle either. And crosswords are impossible that way. The old format TLS was rather like a tabloid newspaper, which I found easy to read and handle, and of 28 pages per edition. The new format has 48 pages (which is not 2 times 28) and is rather cramped and crowded and with heavier paper to make it look there’s more to it than there is.
The look and feel they seem to have gone for is “Generic Weekend Supplement”, as you can see if you compare it with last week’s Irish Times Weekend Magazine:
The latter supplement has 52 pages instead of 48 and has more advertisements inside but is otherwise similar.
So why mention this? Well one thing is that the number of crosswords provided by the TLS per year has now reduced by half, which to me reduces the value of the subscription significantly. Moreover, the first issue of the new style supplement was published on September 5th, but didn’t arrive through my letterbox until 24th September. That’s 19 days. The deadline for entries to the crossword competition was September 15th.
Now the old-style issues used to take about 10 days to cross the Irish Sea, which I thought was bad, but 19 days is just awful. One theory of this is that the TLS launches issues with the same momentum, so that the new edition, having about twice the mass, has half the speed and therefore takes roughly twice as long to reach the subscriber. Checking the envelope, incidentally, I see that it was postmarked Bratislava. There must be a very cheap – but slow – way of sending post from the UK to Ireland via Slovakia.
Anyway, I’ve decided not to renew my subscription to the TLS, as I did with Private Eye recently. I cancelled my subscription to the Eye not because I was offended by anything in it, but because it was taking a ridiculously long time to arrive. I can still pick up copies of both publications in the local newsagent. I’m sure Paddy will keep copies of both to one side if I ask him.
Alternatively, I might switch from the TLS to the London Review of Books or some similar. Does anyone have recommendations?
I haven’t followed cricket very closely since I moved to Ireland, but I do look and see how Glamorgan are getting on. The County Championship started very poorly for them, with a thrashing by Middlesex, but they improved substantially and went into the last round of matches secure in 2nd place of Division 2. They lost their last match in Cardiff against a team from the Midlands, by 7 wickets – a game that actually ended on Friday – but they still finished second. That means that they get promoted to Division 1 for the first time in 21 years.
I wouldn’t bet against them being relegated straight away, though. Last time they got promoted (in 2004) they played just one season (2005) in the First Division, during which they lost 14 of their 16 matches, and dropped back down. They almost got promoted in 2010 but were pipped for second place by Worchestershire, who were the beneficiaries of an exceedingly generous – let’s put it that way – declaration by Sussex that allowed them to win their last match. Anyway, to avoid the drop next season Glamorgan need to improve their pace attack considerably. I wonder who, if anyone, they’ll sign?
Glamorgan plays an important role in the international cricket ecosystem, especially with the Ashes coming up. Many of Australia’s star players – including Marnus Labuschagne, Michael Neser, and Usman Khawaja – only came to prominence after stepping up to the big time to play for Glamorgan.
Knowing that the cricket season was almost over, on Friday I decided to give my front lawn one last mow too. The mower is now in the shed until next spring. Leaves have been falling for some time already, so I swept up what I could after cutting the grass. That reminds me to share this, which I found on Bluesky:
I really hate those things…
Anyway, we have completed one week of teaching at Maynooth University which passed off reasonably smoothly. I only had one timetabling glitch, but that was resolved trivially by just swapping two sessions. This year the Department of Physics has quite a lot of students in the final-year on the Physics with Astrophysics programme, run before the merger by the Department of Experimental Physics. Now we’re combined we can share the load and I’ll be supervising a couple of students on an astrophysics project, which will be a new experience. I haven’t really taught much astrophysics since coming here nearly eight years ago, so this will make a nice change.
It’s Saturday again, so it’s time for a summary of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published five new papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 141, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 376.
The first paper to report this week is “The Bispectrum of Intrinsic Alignments: Theory Modelling and Forecasts for Stage IV Galaxy Surveys” by Thomas Bakx (Utrecht U., NL), Alexander Eggemeier (U. Bonn, DE), Toshiki Kurita (MPA Garching, DE), Nora Elisa Chisari (Leiden U., NL) and Zvonimir Vlah (Ruđer Bošković Institute, Croatia). This paper was published on Monday 22nd September 2025 in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It studies the bispectrum of intrinsic galaxy alignments, a possible source of systematic errors in extracting cosmological information from the analysis of weak lensing surveys.
The overlay is here:
You can make this larger by clicking on it. The officially accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.
The third one this week, published on Wednesday 24th September 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Is feedback-free star formation possible?” by Andrea Ferrara, Daniele Manzoni, and Evangelia Ntormousi (all of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy). This paper presents an argument that Lyman-alpha radiation pressure strongly limits star formation efficiency, even at solar metallicities, so that a feedback-free star formation phase is not possible without feedback. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.
Next we have “Microphysical Regulation of Non-Ideal MHD in Weakly-Ionized Systems: Does the Hall Effect Matter?” by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech, USA), Jonathan Squire (U. Otago, New Zeland), Raphael Skalidis (Caltech) and Nadine H. Soliman (Caltech). This was also published on Wednesday 24th September 2025, but in the folder Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It presents an improved treatment of non-ideal effects in magnetohydrodynamics, particularly the Hall effect, and a discussion of the implications for weakly-ionized astrophysical systems.
The corresponding overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version of this one on arXiv here.
I’m very sad to have to report the death, at the age of 80, of eminent cosmologist George Smoot, who passed away at his home in Paris on 18th September. The news has been reported in France, where George had been living in recent years, but doesn’t seem to have been covered in the international media yet. I thought I would just record some personal relfections and reminiscences here, rather than try to pre-empt the official biographies.
I was fortunate enough to meet George many times over the years and to get to know him quite well. The first time was at a meeting in Durham for which this was the conference photo:
George is just to the left of centre in the front row with the red-and-white sweater.
What I remember about that meeting is that I gave a contributed talk there (a short one, because I was a mere postdoc at the time). Some time after that, George Smoot gave an invited talk during the course of which he mentioned (positively) the work I had spoken about. I was gobsmacked to have my little contribution recognized by someone so eminent, and it did wonders for my scientific self-confidence. I got the chance to have a conversation with George in person some time later at that meeting and found him very good value: he was both interesting and amusing to talk to. He was someone who took mentorship seriously, and didn’t confine it to those people he was working with directly.
Over the years I met George regularly at scientific meetings, including numerous times at the (then) Daniel Chalonge schools in Sicily and in Paris where we often chatted about science and other things over coffee breaks and dinner. I always found him hugely knowledgeable about many things, but he also had an almost child-like curiosity about things he didn’t previously know. He didn’t quite jump up and down with excitement when he learnt something interesting, but almost. He could also be very direct when disagreeing, which meant that some people found him a bit abrasive. He fell out with other members of the COBE time when he threw away the agreed protocol for the announcement of results in 1992. That caused a lot of bad feeling at the time, but it seems that by the time the Nobel Prize was awarded, some degree of reconciliation had been achieved. I was lucky enough to attend the Prize Ceremonies and at the ball afterwards chatted with both George and John Mather who seemed on very amiable terms then.
Anyway, in the early noughties George invited me to spend some time at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a visit that I enjoyed enormously. He was a very generous and thougtful host and I was looked after very well. One day at LBL he asked me if the hotel was OK. I replied that it was, but one thing I didn’t like about staying in a hotel was that I liked to cook and that was impossible in a hotel room. I thought nothing more of that conversation until the end of the day when George appeared and asked me if I wanted to “do dinner” at his house that evening. I answered in the affirmative so he drove me to his house, which was very fancy, set into the hillside overlooking Berkeley – like the sort of place I imagine a film star would live – and had a very large and well-provisioned kitchen.
It soon became clear that I’d misunderstood the invitation, in that “do dinner” didn’t mean “eat dinner” but “make dinner”. Although I was slightly taken aback I set about finding what he had in the refrigerator and on the shelves. There being a plentiful supply of spices, I decided to make a tandoori-style dish of chicken baked with yoghurt, with a couple of side dishes, none of which took long to cook. When everything was getting ready I wanted to add some lemon juice but couldn’t find any lemons in the fridge. I asked George if he had any lemons, at which point he showed me into the garden where he had several lemon trees in full fruit. I’ve never lived anywhere that this would be possible! I think he enjoyed the dinner because he paid me back a few days later with a dinner at Chez Panisse. He was quite the bon viveur.
(After that short visit, I was planning to spend a sabbatical year in Berkeley in 2005, but the United States Embassy in London put paid to that idea and I went to CITA in Toronto instead.)
The last encounters I had with George were online; he was in the audience when I gave talks in the Chalonge-de Vega series organized by Norma Sanchez in 2021 (here and here). I think he had already moved to Paris by that time. The first of these talks was about open access publishing in astrophysics; George subsequently co-authored a paper in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
My favourite quote from George came during a discussion we had at Berkeley when I suggested that some methods used for studying the cosmic microwave background could be applied to the distribution of galaxies. His response was “Galaxies are shit”. To avoid offending my friends who work on galaxies, what he meant by that was that he thought galaxies were too messy for any statistical measurements to sufficiently reliable to compete with the CMB. I think he would have preferred a universe in which all galaxies were identical, like electrons.
I’m sure many others will have their own personal reflections on their interactions with George Smoot, but he also had a huge influence on many people who never met him personally, through his enormous contributions to astrophysics and cosmology. We will no doubt read many professionally-written official obituaries in days to come, but all I can say in a personal blog post is that he was a character, a very original thinker, a fine scientist, and a very nice man. Along with many others, I will miss him enormously.
While writing yesterday’s post about the evolution of languages, and the importance of genetic information in reconstructing the story thereof, I was reminded of a post I wrote a while ago about the peculiarities of my own genome, a listing of which I have on a CD-ROM at home. There’s not as much data involved as you might think: it’s effectively only about 800 MB.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, it turns out that I have the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation. Not only that, I have it twice over, in that I have two copies (homozygotes). I must therefore have inherited it from both parents. This mutation confers virtually complete immunity from HIV-1 infection.
The above graphic shows that more than 10% of the population in Northern Europe has this mutation in just one allele (i.e. they are heterozygotic). To get an estimate of how many have the form on two alleles (i.e. homozygotic) form you can just square that number, so around 1% or more.
It is thought that the CCR5-Δ32 mutation occurred in a single individual in Scandinavia around 1,000 years ago. When I wrote that post I tacitly assumed that it had propagated passively, i.e. without any particular selection, to the modern era. That it reached 10% of the population starting from just one individual surprised me, but I let it pass.
More recently, I came across a paper about how advances in genetics have impacted epidemiological studies. In the abstract it shows that my assumption was probably incorrect.
Algorithms of molecular evolutionary theory suggested that the CCR5-Δ32 mutation occurred but once in the last millennium and rose by strong selective pressure relatively recently to a ~10% allele frequency in Europeans.
It goes on to say this:
Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that CCR5-Δ32 was selected due to its protective influence to resist Yersinia pestis, the agent of the Black Death/bubonic plague of the 14th century.
I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post that evidence of the plague bacillus is found in a significant number of prehistoric human remains and this almost certainly played a role in the ebb and flow of populations. In the context of CCR5-∆32, however it seems that it may have been advantageous to carry it long before the arrival of HIV/AIDS. That might account for it reaching the relatively high level that it did.
Among the downsides, however, as the article explains, are an increased risk for encephalomyelitis and death when infected with the West Nile virus. Hopefully further cohort studies of people with this mutation will help elucidate its effect on other diseases.
By the way, in contrast to most people I know, I have still never had Covid-19…
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In the Dark 