Glittering prizes

Alexandra Walsham, lecturer at the University of Exeter, has received the Pounds 1,000 Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize 2000 for Providence in Early Modern England, published by Oxford University Press. The runner-up was Mitchell B. Merback, lecturer in art history at DePauw University, Indiana, for The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Philip Schlesinger, director of the Stirling Media Research Institute, has been appointed a visiting professor at the Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, in the Queen Victoria Eugenia British Hispanic chair of doctoral studies. The chair was inaugurated by the infanta of Spain and is intended to promote further cooperation between Spain and the United Kingdom.

Julie Barlow, professor in Coventry University's school of health and social sciences, has been invited to join a government task force on managing chronic medical conditions.

Sir George Mathewson, executive deputy chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc, will receive an honorary doctor of laws from the University of St Andrews in June.

The University of Ulster is to award an honorary degree to Helen Bamber, founder of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Other recipients of honorary degrees from Ulster include playwright Frank McGuinness, Joan Smyth, former chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, and Brian Baird, managing director of ICI in Northern Ireland and the republic.

Frank Read, professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Manchester, has received this year's Holweck medal and prize for his work on atomic and molecular physics. The award was instituted in 1945 jointly by the French and British Physical Societies as a memorial to Fernand Holweck, director of the Curie Laboratory of the Radium Institute, who was killed by the Gestapo.