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“... judiciously selected and juxtaposed, it changes our knowledge of the subject overnight. But Read’s text is admirable. It provides, among other things, a thoroughly documented exploration of how sculptors were trained, how they organised their studios, divided their labour, attracted attention and, by puffing and jobbery as often as not, secured public ...”

“... Somewhere on the road between Twin Peaks and Faulkner country you might come across Pinckney Benedict hacking out a prickly little clearing for himself in the shadow of some of American fiction’s more established, and more pronounceable, names – Pynchon, Steinbeck and Sam Shepard among them. Pinckney Benedict’s world is a small-town one, real backwoods stuff, an angle which his publishers are not over-anxious to play down ...”

“... and the United States – produced the (figurative) ‘big men’ of anthropology who are still read seriously today. One can think of their production as coming in three distinct waves. The first generation came to maturity in the palmy days before the Great War, when the empires were assuming their final consolidated form, and colonialism seemed ...”

“... the inner workings of her intellectual circle, many of whose members were also her lovers: Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, Geoffrey Gorer. In retracing the exploits of this scholarly ménage à plusieurs, and in recovering their ideas alongside their passions, Mandler has captured a defining moment in the history of American ...”

“... sink into a fundamentalist nightmare where verbal insult is injury, punishable as crime. Helen Benedict’s Virgin and Vamp and Gregory Matoesian’s Reproducing Rape are part of this assault: they seek to combat rape by reforming the way it is described. Although Benedict’s book is a journalist’s critique of rape ...”

“... grace of the most complete fragility,’ she gushed in a letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. ‘You’ve no idea how moving six feet four of vulnerable beauty is. He gets all the points, is extraordinarily sensitive to people.’ Mead and Fortune set up camp on the shore of Lake Chambri near Bateson’s field site, and began a four-month study ...”

“... of Si Abd Allah. Henry Munson presents his story in a most original manner and it deserves to be read and enjoyed by all sorts of people who have no professional interest in anthropology. There are really three authors. The two principal narrators, both born in Tangier, are first cousins but separated by 18 years in age and several centuries in general ...”

“... our thinking about the world. But it is understandable, and touching, that the first footnote to Benedict Anderson’s afterword to his new edition should read, in explanation of the trimming of the title in his text: ‘Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words from which the vampires of ...”

“... that earned Rizal the implacable enemies who brought him to his early death. It is impossible to read Noli Me Tangere today in the way a patriotic young Manileño of 1897 would have read it: as a political hand grenade. We all have the spectre of comparisons crouched on our shoulders. It was only the second novel ever ...”

“... during which the whole planet became known for the first time to a single, powerful civilisation. Read as a triumph of science and reason over what Washington Irving, in his biography of the Discoverer, called ‘the long night of monkish bigotry and false learning’, it seemed also to presage the eclipse of the Old World and the lasting ascendancy of the ...”

“... romantic intrigues. She had a lifelong, on-off love affair with another of Boas’s students, Ruth Benedict, in comparison with whom her other lovers and husbands come off looking much slighter figures. (The linguist Edward Sapir, in particular, disgraces himself with belittlements and lies almost every time he writes a letter to or about her.) ...”

“... memory, a lucid legal mind and a gift for languages. Under four popes – Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XI – Pacelli steadily grew in esteem and influence. He was the chief draftsman of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which greatly extended the powers of the papacy over the universal church. As nuncio to Germany from 1917 until 1929 he developed ...”

“... has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that – with some ...”

“... pots. Olive and Humphry take Philip in; he is apprenticed to a demonically talented potter named Benedict Fludd, who works and lives in a partly derelict manor house in the Romney Marshes. There are two large themes: the relations of men and women, and the relations of parents and children. Dorothy Wellwood prosecutes an arduous path to becoming a ...”

“... reconquest, at least long enough to last until rich and eager Anglo-Saxon aristocrats like Benedict Biscop came to Rome, hunting for materials to build up their own collections back home in Whitby or Ripon or Jarrow. Nothing is known about books taken to England by the first wave of missionaries under St Augustine, sent out by Pope Gregory the Great in ...”