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[Extract] In his will of 1704, John Locke (1632–1704) bequeathed his manuscripts to his relative Peter King (1669–1734), first Baron King. King’s descendants, the earls of Lovelace, preserved these manuscripts until 1947, when the collection was acquired by the Bodleian Library en bloc.1 This collection was catalogued by Philip Long in his Summary Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of the Papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library (1959).2 Scholars interested in consulting Locke’s manuscripts can refer to Long’s Summary Catalogue for a guide to the Lovelace Collection; however, a systematic catalogue of the smaller deposits of Locke’s manuscripts in several other repositories remains a desideratum. These repositories acquired Locke’s manuscripts from a variety of different sources, particularly the nineteenth-century autograph market and a small number of sales presided over by the descendants of Locke’s close friend Edward Clarke (1650–1710), the MP for Taunton (1690–1710).3

In this paper I argue that the characters of Lance and his dog Crab were a late addition to Shakespeare’s ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, and are partly a satire on the Isle of Dogs affair. If this correct, the play as we now have it was probably first performed in late 1597 or early 1598.

Although the UK is not a strongly seismic region, the study of earthquakes in Britain presents many interesting points. First, British earthquakes are rather well documented throughout history, partly due to the intellectual development and literacy of the country and partly because British earthquakes have always been so newsworthy that even minor events have been recorded in some detail. Secondly, as is rather typical for intraplate areas, the relationship between seismicity and geological structure is unclear. The definitely non-random spatial pattern of British earthquakes is clearly due to something. However, among competing theories as to what that something is, no hypothesis is clearly the best. In this paper, the subject of British seismicity is viewed from several angles. First, the sources that underlie the earthquake catalogue are discussed in order to give a clear indication of the limits on the completeness and accuracy of the data. General statistics for earthquake occurrence in the UK are then presented. This is followed by a description of British seismicity from region to region, with remarks on some key earthquakes of interest. Different hypotheses on the nature of the tectonic or geological control are then reviewed and assessed. Finally, the subject of active faults in the UK is discussed, from the point of view of general seismic hazard assessment.