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Uncaging the beast

Sheldon Rothblatt, 16 February 1989

Victorian Anthropology 
by George Stocking.
Collier Macmillan, 429 pp., £22, October 1987, 0 02 931550 6
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... examine their leading concepts (‘culture’, ‘evolution’) or place them in perspective than George Stocking of the University of Chicago. His brilliant essays and intellectual leadership have virtually built an academic specialty. And Victorian Anthropology is unquestionably his masterpiece, a work of precision, subtlety and historical irony. Two ...

Who now cares about Malinowski?

Robert Ackerman, 23 May 1996

After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 
by George Stocking.
Athlone, 570 pp., £50, January 1996, 0 485 30072 9
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... historian I was seeking existed and had already begun to make his presence felt. In 1966 George Stocking had argued (in ‘On the Limits of “Presentism” and “Historicism” in the Historiography of the Behavioural Sciences’) that anthropology could not be said to have a proper history at all until it was no longer conducted as a game of ...

Destined to Disappear

Susan Pedersen: ‘Race Studies’, 20 October 2016

White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations 
by Robert Vitalis.
Cornell, 272 pp., $29.95, November 2015, 978 0 8014 5397 7
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... citizenship rights and colonial self-determination. All were, as the historian of anthropology George Stocking put it, ‘evolutionists’: that is, they assimilated ‘races’ to ‘stages’ of the human evolutionary past, and then assumed each had to develop separately and at its own pace. After all, these were the principles that governed race ...

A Light-Blue Stocking

Helen Deutsch: Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi, 14 May 2009

Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress’ 
by Ian McIntyre.
Constable, 450 pp., £25, November 2008, 978 1 84529 449 6
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... Walter Raleigh and A.E. Newton were also admirers (Newton, in an essay entitled ‘A Light-Blue Stocking’, wrote that Hester was the female writer he would most like to meet because, ever ‘charming and fluffy’ unlike the formidable and mannish George Eliot, she did not require ‘a preliminary oiling of … mental ...

Edward and Tilly and George

Robert Melville, 15 March 1984

Swans Reflecting Elephants: My Early Years 
by Edward James, edited by George Melly.
Weidenfeld, 178 pp., £8.95, July 1982, 0 297 77988 5
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... last of the 11 tapes which recorded Edward’s recollections of the first 27 years of his life. George Melly handled the tapes and later pruned and rearranged their contents. The book didn’t appear until five years later, but the recording had been a rush job for George, occupying four days between two singing dates ...

Taking the hint

David Craig, 5 January 1989

The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, 1822 
by John Prebble.
Collins, 399 pp., £15, November 1988, 0 00 215404 8
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... Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, Scott dubbed a principal ...

Short Cuts

Marina Warner: The Flood, 6 March 2014

... I face More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together ...

Unmistakable

Michael Rogin, 20 August 1998

Celebrity Caricature in America 
by Wendy Wick Reaves.
Yale, 320 pp., £29.95, April 1998, 0 300 07463 8
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... The stocking cap, solid black on top and red-ribbed across the tube, an eye popping out at the face end. Red outline for ear, forked red line for mouth, blue-grey near-rectangle vertically placed for shoulder. These lines and shapes precipitate a face, itself un-outlined, from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx ...

Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary

Mark Ford: Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary, 29 November 2007

... pieces of furniture, parts of boats, and clothes – I picked up a woman’s long black cotton stocking. Curiosity. My mother said sharplyPut that down! I remember clearly, clearly – But since that night, that day, that reprimand I have suffered from abnormal thirst – A number of these details are reprised in another uncompleted poem set on a beach ...

The Need for Buddies

Roy Porter, 22 June 2000

British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World 
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000, 0 19 820376 4
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... like the Robin Hood, while others were aesthetic, like the Society of Dilettanti. When, early in George III’s reign, the Duchess of Newcastle drew up her own guide to ‘what’s on in London’, she listed not merely theatres, pleasure gardens and so on, but ‘the Macaroni Club, Boodle’s Club ... the Goose-trees Club, Savoir Vivre Club, Bill of ...

In Pursuit of an Heiress

Nicholas Penny: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, 16 June 2016

Letters of a Dead Man 
by Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, edited and translated by Linda Parshall.
Dumbarton Oaks, 753 pp., £55.95, May 2016, 978 0 88402 411 8
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... kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in Dublin. The tone is oddly like that of someone who is eager to reassure an older sister of his orthodox sexual ...

Taunted with the Duke of Kent, she married the Aga Khan

Rosemary Hill: Coming Out, 19 October 2006

Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 305 pp., £20, October 2006, 0 571 22859 3
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... and fathers to curtsey to the queen. After this initiation ceremony, dating back to the reign of George III, they would be officially ‘out’, launched into the world, the London Season and the marriage market. It was, as Jessica Mitford wrote two years later, ‘the specific, upper-class version of the puberty rite’. Or rather it had been, for 1958 saw ...

It Rhymes

Michael Wood, 6 April 1995

The Wild Party 
by Joseph Moncure March, with drawings by Art Spiegelman .
Picador, 112 pp., £9.99, November 1994, 0 330 33656 8
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... Lorenz Hart and Marianne Moore in the same lineup; who like poems that could be set to music by George Gershwin or Kurt Weill, brittle and easy, wearing their sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long while/From May to December ... ’ Louis Untermeyer, in an enthusiastic ...

Biting Habits

Hugh Pennington: The Zika Virus, 18 February 2016

... from their legs, sometimes leading to respiratory failure, and loss of feeling with a ‘glove and stocking’ distribution. It isn’t rare. Neither is microcephaly. I looked after people with it when I was a nurse in a hospital for the intellectually disabled (established 150 years ago as the Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles of the Seven Northern ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... modernism (the sealing couplet!), the century and England all together, with a touch of sweetness: Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey, head to a hard arm, they kiss under the rain, bruised by their marble bed. In Garsdale, dawn; at Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sacks steam in the sun, they sit up. Copper wire ...

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