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“... Soyez mysterieuses,’ Paul Gauguin had carved into the lintel of his last residence in the South Seas, the ‘House of Pleasure’, or ‘House of Orgasm’, as some would translate Maison du Jouir. ‘I am not a painter who copies nature – today less than before. With me everything happens in my crazy imagination.’ In September 1901, at the urging of that crazy imagination, Gauguin had left Tahiti ...”

“... Earlier this year, bushfires engulfed the east coast of Australia. In Canberra, where I work, five hundred houses were lost. The National University was in a state of shock. Mount Stromlo, an icon of Australian astronomy since Federation, is gone, with all its telescopes and research data. In Melbourne, where I live, the air was thick with smoke from fires 300 km away ...”

“... There has never been a ‘Pacificism’ to go with Orientalism, the South Seas having always seemed more luscious than mysterious. The obligations felt by the ‘civilised’ to turn South Sea islanders into something else was too strong for there to be any thought of learning from them, and scholarly encounters seemed a little too hedonist to be serious ...”

“... more than the mutiny of the Bounty. It has an important ethnographical and historical side and Mr Dening has some uncommonly interesting things to say, particularly when he deals with quantifiable matters such as the flogging of British seamen in the Pacific during the 18th century and the value of their diet in calories; he also gives a fine account of ...”

“... In which case, Priestley might have figured in a brilliant study by the historian-anthropologist Greg Dening, whose book on Gooch’s death treats symmetrically the cultures of Hawaii and of the English academies where the astronomer was taught his science. Or perhaps, less happily, the martyred Priestley would have attracted the attention of an ...”

“... in colonial accounts is the conundrum of this book. The problem is not peculiar to North America. Greg Dening, writing about Polynesia, located the issue around actual and metaphorical islands and beaches. The islands – the interior of native cultures and society that Europeans only slowly penetrated – had a shadowy history, much of it ...”

“... tattooed Man of Feeling, dripping with sweat. Among the many published accounts of the incident, Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the ‘Bounty’ (1994) is the one to beat.* Dening, an anthropologist, analysed the mutiny as an incident in cultural history, a microhistorical ...”