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“... as an indigent ‘specimen’ in a charity hospital in France in 1921, and to the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose dissertation in 1953 concerned the ‘civil inattention’ practised on Shetland. Such silent treatment is hardly provincial, let alone past; today we call it ‘ghosting’.Forced to wear a scarlet letter of shame for all to ...”

“... effected in the history of psychiatry over the last twenty or thirty years. The works of Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, and more recently the contributions of Andrew Scull and a new generation of historians, have made it impossible to accept the Whig view of psychiatry’s history. Yet, if these writers have managed to convince ...”

“... and prisons. They didn’t change much over the next twenty years. In 1961 the sociologist Erving Goffman described their American counterparts as ‘total institutions’.In 1949, when my mother arrived at Netherne to be trained in mental nursing, she was taking a similar route to the one Beegan had taken. It is possible he was still alive when ...”

“... all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap enough for the ...”

“... and the role which he or she is both occupying and performing – the ‘role distance’, as Erving Goffman called it – to occupy and perform a role at all is to behave as something, and that something is defined by reference to characteristics of the institution, not the person, concerned. It is true that in some contexts, however unusual, a ...”

“... of such an unmapped social area and the delicacy required to negotiate it would have delighted Erving Goffman. 31 May, Chichester. The city has streets and streets of immaculate 17th and 18th-century houses, particularly round Pallant House; they’re manicured and swept clean and at night are as empty as a stage set. It’s quiet too, except (and ...”

“... it so that he can analyse it, tracking down the missing laugh until the audience laughs at itself. Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee, though the more accessible material put out by other (and more vapid) stand-ups derives in part from Goffman’s observation of small behaviour. It’s austere stuff, Stewart ...”