Given it's the summer, it might be a good opportunity to get an appointment with the university counselling service quickly. I think a counsellor might well be able to help you deal with your fear of public speaking in the medium term. Short term is tougher. Personally, I would level with whichever is the most sympathetic of your supervisors. People do drop out of conferences for all sorts of reasons and panels get rearranged, so it's not the end of the world. I think you do need to tell one of them though rather than just emailing the overall organiser out of courtesy. Your supervisor might well understand from his/her own experience. Many academics don't find public speaking easy.

Whatever your field would consider a 4* output in REF terms, I think = a top journal. In my field that equates to about a 5% acceptance rate with the vast majority of submissions being desk rejected by the editorial board.

Don't - it's one of the multiple imprints of the VDM Verlag! Or at least have a read of this first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDM_Publishing and see whether you really think this is something that will enhance your career. I think when they were caught publishing Wikipedia articles as 'books', they really lost any residual credibility they had. If your MA thesis is genuinely publishable, then you probably need to look at rewriting the key findings in the form of a journal article.

I don't think CDLs are really designed for PhD study at all but rather Masters / conversion courses. How are you going to manage to pay it back while continuing to study after the first year? You are not going to like this advice, but I really would defer your place until you have funding, or if you have a decently paying job enrol as a part-time student in the first instance and have a go at getting fulltime funding again next year. Given how bad the employment market is for humanities PhDs, I really would not want to get into lots of debt to do one. Self-funding is OK, if you have family / a partner who can (and is willing to) financially support you, but I would be wary of borrowing to self-fund.

It shouldn't take months, but you need to allow for the following - examiners need to complete paperwork, the graduate office needs to process it and sometimes the corrections have to be agreed by a Dean (to make sure they are clear and reasonable). It normally does take a fortnight or so where I am. If though as is probable in August, one link in the chain is on holiday, then delays happen. It all has to be done formally but your internal might be willing to unofficially pass the corrections list onto your supervisor to speed things up - just depends if they're a stickler for doing things by the book or not. So I really wouldn't worry at this stage but if you haven't got it in another fortnight, then I'd start pushing a bit.

What do you want to do in the long term? As far as I understand it, an MBA is only worthwhile if you do a really good one, and they seem to prefer people with rather more working experience. I'm guessing from your post that you are interested in the N American model of formal PhD programmes with a taught element before the thesis? If so, you could look at Georgia Tech perhaps - I'm sure there are others too. But given how long US PhDs take unless you want an academic career, would it be worthwhile?

The standards of top journals are much higher than PhD ones. If they were not, why would many people with PhDs never actually get an article accepted in a top journal but enjoy perfectly adequate academic careers? Don't fret about it, just take on board any reviewers' comments, revise and submit to an appropriate second tier journal. No-one's PhD thesis is perfect - yours was good enough! And maybe this reviewer has given you a point that you can build on in the revised article.
It might be helpful to think of the PhD as an apprenticeship. You've now got the certificate to say you're fit to do independent research but you're not suddenly going to be the best in your field. You have the time to mature and do better research. If you think of the greats in your field - how many are famous for their PhD thesis? In my field, I can't think of a single one. But what you really must not do, is lose your confidence over one rejection. We all get them, sometimes they are brutal, but the key point is to lick your wounds, curse the reviewers and then move on.

quote]

Thank you bewildered!It's true that from the point of view of the university, it's impossible to know each individual's contribution towards writing a paper.I think there's no option but to either publish this research as a book or that one of us ends being a research assistant to the other. Also, I was curious to know if there has been a case where a PhD was awarded to someone for having published a paper/book (without enrolling in a course, I mean)[/quote]
There is something called PhD by publication but it requires a lot more than one article. It's also often only available to members of staff at that institution. I think some Scottish universities are more open to letting others go this route but I think it would need to be a series of single-authored publications in high impact journals / or a book with a top academic publisher. I'm also rather dubious that anyone would be allowed to gain a PhD for work where a portion of the research had been done by a research assistant. I think you might have to choose between your plan to do some research together and your desire to get PhDs out of it.

No it would not be possible for two people to earn a PhD for the same piece of work. There would need to be two discrete projects even if they were looking at the same site. There would need to be no overlap at all between the written content of the theses. Universities are going to be wary of this proposal because of the risk of collusion and potential plagiarism between the two theses. A PhD is meant to be a qualification showing that the degree holder can carry out research independently and I think they'd be concerned that one or other of you wouldn't be doing that. There's nothing to stop you doing the research and writing a paper together, but as a plan it's probably not suitable for PhD study.
To avoid confusion by the way, the term collaborative PhD in the UK usually refers to a PhD that is a collaboration between industry and the university: a PhD candidate would work on a project important to the industrial partner, and have an industrial and an academic supervisor. So you might see the term but it doesn't mean what you were wanting to do.

Although Walter put it harshly, I would urge you to consider what he is saying as I think there is some possibly unwelcome truth in it. Rather than blaming others for the lab being unchallenging, what are YOU doing in your current post to make yourself more attractive as a candidate for the sort of jobs you want in industry and academia? And how competitive are you if you looked at your cv critically? If you are not nationally / internationally mobile because of your family situation, then networking in your region is going to be vital for instance. I don't blame your spouse for putting pressure on you to decide something - endless discussion and uncertainty is horrible for your family as well, and it might be that their interests have to come ahead of your dream job. Could you not agree what for both of you is non-negotiable e.g. location, working hours, job security and then you have a set of parameters to work within and perhaps can see more clearly what you need to do, whether that involves more publications, getting a grant independently etc?

When PhD students become very jealous of other students and insist that the other student is stealing their ideas, it really is usually based on a misunderstanding. Particularly, as in the OP's case, they are convinced that more than one student is stealing ideas. When a supervisor has more than one student working on similar topics, there is inevitably going to be some overlap but that mirrors real life. In other words, there will be other students in the UK and elsewhere also working on similar topics, and sometimes they will publish first. Let's face it, most of us work on small refinements or new cases, not ground-breaking research. OP rather than ruin your relationship with your supervisors and the other students entirely, by wasting money on a solicitor to issue threats, or wasting your own time hassling irrelevant government agencies like the QAA, why not talk to your supervisors and say you are worried about overlap and ask how you can make your project distinct. Good research groups do share ideas, as that is how the research process works. Maybe if you and the other student both end up using the same site, you could think in terms of a joint publication i.e. cooperation rather than competition?

You are unlikely to be able to get any funding for a history PhD without an MA in the UK. You will also need outstanding BA and MA results to be a competitive candidate for AHRC awards (the main funder - fees only too for EU citizens, who haven't lived in the UK for 3 years). You will also find a growing reluctance in the UK to allow any student to progress straight from a BA to a PhD in the humanities. It still happens in some lab-based science areas, but is rare otherwise. This might limit your choices of university to a small number.

No-one can tell you because the results of the block grant partnership bids for PhD studentships from 2014 onwards aren't out yet. So the university doesn't know whether it will have any studentships in your area yet. They will advertise what funding they have and invite applications probably in Spring 2014. The AHRC doesn't decide who gets funding, it's the universities with the block grant funding who choose. Basically all you can do is wait until the universities know whether they do or don't have funding and then apply when it's advertised.