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“... Most people, including most social anthropologists, have only a hazy idea about the origins of human culture. For decades the whole treacherous territory has been avoided, and anthropology has come to construct itself in such a way that the subject is indeed unknowable. But here is a book which calls discretion’s bluff. Chris Knight has come up with a new and startling theory: human culture originated with a sex strike by female primates, a revolutionary act of collective solidarity which transformed ‘females’ into women ...”

“... There is a popular vision of the anthropologist as figure-of-fun which an allegorical ‘Margaret Mead’ is coming to represent: the blunderer into tribal life, dupe of the primitives, the self-dramatiser, spinner of graceless and unlikely theories. Another version of the anthropologist is the philosopher of culture and society in all its variations, one who understands humanity in some broad, if rather intuitive and dreamy way: Ruth Benedict, though her work is deeply unfashionable today, has this kind of position ...”

“... Most people, without thinking about it very much, elide sexual differences between men and women with gender, the cultural categories of masculinity and femininity. Surely, one might imagine, the more scientists discover about the former, the more refined and true will the latter become. These two books undermine that view. People are aware that non-Western cultures have different ideas about gender from our own, but no one is disturbed by that for a moment: their ideas, we say to ourselves, are based on ignorance and strange religions and values ...”

“... we catch glimpses of the reality, we are surprised to find it peopled by ordinary human beings. Caroline Humphrey’s book, Karl Marx Collective, tells us what we want to know: what is the relation between theory and practice, what is the relation of the state and the party to the local unit – in this case collective farms – how much are ...”

“... to exist but remained largely out of reach. In her stimulating book The Unmaking of Soviet Life, Caroline Humphrey – one of the few anthropologists with substantial field experience in the old Soviet Union – explores changing attitudes to consumption. Consumer desire, she argues, was both aroused and frustrated in Soviet-type societies and ...”

“... stories made me feel’ in his account of his travels. This is not a risk for Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, academic anthropologists from Berkeley and Cambridge respectively, who, rejecting recent trends towards subjectivity in anthropology, stick to the disciplinary tradition of impersonality. Their subject, a welcome complement to ...”

“... Tom Harrisson, the Marxist poet Charles Madge and (briefly) the experimental filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. It attempted to create ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ by ‘observing’ ordinary Britons as they went about their ordinary lives – and by enlisting those same people as diarists and commentators. In the decade or so after its foundation ...”

“... In the rewritten version, ‘it was, suddenly, as if he were once again with Blaise’s sister, Caroline, thirty years earlier, the two of them in that rare collusion, a mutual passion that had produced a highly unlovable love child, who had become a nun.’ Neither Caroline nor the unlovable love child appears in ...”

“... along. Professor Koss quotes the ‘Scotch Lieutenant called Lismahago’ who in Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker says that ‘he would always consider the liberty of the press as a national evil while it enabled the vilest reptile to soil the lustre of the most shining merit and furnished the most infamous incendiary with the means of disturbing the peace ...”

“... to be fitted for a pair of shoes at Peal & Co, a family firm famous for its clientele: Humphrey Bogart! Marlene Dietrich! Fred Astaire! The Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson! Each customer was measured, and the findings entered in a series of ledgers known as the ‘Feet Books’; the bespoke shoemakers then modelled wooden lasts to be used to make ...”