The Oxford Movement in the 1830s prompted some formidable theological scholarship which profoundly affected the lives and personalities of many Oxford-educated Church of England clergymen, not a few of whom combined deeply scholarly lives with successful parish ministries. This essay examines the lives of two such men, Canon T.F. Simmons, a parish priest in Yorkshire for some thirty years, and Bishop Mandell Creighton, much of whose scholarly writing was produced in a remote Northumberland parish before his return to Cambridge and London. By the end of the century such learned clergymen were becoming a rarity in the Church of England.

The Sargur Group has been considered to be the oldest group (>3.0 Ga) in the Archaean sequence of the Dharwar Craton in south India, whereas the rocks of the Dharwar Supergroup are younger (between 3.0 and 2.55 Ga). The supracrustal units of the Sargur Group were deposited during the Archaean period. The Banavara quartzite forms part of the supracrustal Sargur Group and contains significant amounts of chromian spinel (Cr-spinel). Here, U–Pb and Hf isotopes of detrital zircons are integrated with compositional data and X-ray refinement parameters for Cr-spinels to decipher the provenance of the metasediments. Zircons show an age spectrum from 3.15 to 2.50 Ga, and juvenile Hf isotopic compositions (ϵHf = +0.8 to +6.4) with model ages between 3.3 and 3.0 Ga. Major- and trace-element contents of the Cr-spinels do not resemble those in the Sargur ultramafic rocks, but resemble well-characterized Archaean anorthosite-hosted chromites. Cr-spinel trace-element signatures indicate that they have undergone secondary alteration or metamorphism. X-ray refinement parameters for the Cr-spinels also resemble the anorthosite-hosted chromites. We conclude that the detrital minerals were probably derived from gneissic and anorthositic rocks of the Western Dharwar Craton, and that the Sargur Group sequences have experienced a younger (2.5 Ga) metamorphic overprint.

Home care for older people in England is commissioned through local authorities working predominantly with independent providers of care. Commissioners operate in a market model, planning and procuring home care services for local populations. Their role involves ‘managing’ and ‘shaping’ the market to ensure an adequate supply of care providers. Another imperative, emerging from the principles of personalisation, is the drive to achieve user outcomes rather than ‘time and task’ objectives. Little formal research has investigated the way commissioners reconcile these different requirements and organise commissioning. This study investigated commissioning approaches using qualitative telephone interviews with ten commissioners from different local authorities in England. The characteristics of commissioning were analysed thematically. Findings indicated (a) commissioning involved complex systems and processes, uniquely shaped for the local context, but frequently changed, suggesting a constant need for reframing commissioning arrangements; (b) partnerships with providers were mainly transactional, with occasional examples of collaborative models, that were considered to facilitate flexible services more appropriate for commissioning for personalised outcomes; and (c) only a small number of commissioners had attempted to reconcile the competing and incompatible goals of tightly prescribed contracting and working collaboratively with providers. A better understanding of flexible contracting arrangements and the hallmarks of a trusting collaboration is required to move beyond the procedural elements of contracting and commissioning.

Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815–84) combined his ecclesiastical duties and liturgical interests with editing the fourteenth-century Middle English Lay folks’ mass book (1879) for the Early English Text Society, with the aim of showing the continuity of the English Church from the medieval period through the Reformation. In the light of modern scholarship, this article recontextualises both medieval text and Simmons's own editorial practice, and shows how Simmons, as a second-generation Tractarian churchman, sought in this text – and others associated with it – evidence for the Church of England's Catholic underpinning in an imagined medieval English Church.

A case–case-control investigation (N = 255 patients) explored the epidemiology of carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CRPA). Recent exposure to carbapenems and a rapidly fatal condition should prompt practitioners to shorten delays in initiating appropriate therapy, which can adversely impact CRPA outcomes, as opposed to the isolated impact of the carbapenem resistance determinant.