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“... The appearance of a book entitled The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, and written by an anthropologist, will not surprise either historians or anthropologists. In the last ten years the two subjects have been paying increasing attention to each other. They have tried to learn each other’s methods, jargon and mannerisms. They have even begun to meddle with each other’s subject-matter ...”

“... Most of us have very little idea of what life is actually like in the Soviet Union for ordinary people. We are so bombarded by various kinds of propaganda that the Communist world becomes a mythological place, to the extent that when 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 individuals constrained in their lives by central planning, what is family life like, what are schools like, what are funerals like? This is not, however, a subjective account, such as we would find in an autobiography or a short interview ...”

“... One of the most disconcerting aspects of introducing the work of Lévi-Strauss to students is that those who are just beginning an anthropology course often seem able to grasp quickly and easily the main points of his work, while those who have a good anthropological training seem almost invariably incapable of understanding what he is saying. The reason is that Lévi-Strauss’s work deals with different questions from those which are traditionally assumed to be the subject-matter of anthropology ...”

“... evidence, throw extra light on the efficacy of ritual from top to bottom of the social scale. Maurice Bloch describes in great detail the ceremony of the royal bath at the beginning of the agricultural year in Madagascar. There was a complex series of rituals involving a veto on funerals, a hierarchically-ordered giving of gifts, organised weeping ...”

“... in the 1960s to examine the possibility of applying Marxist ideas to pre-industrial societies. Maurice Bloch’s Marxism and Anthropology is, among other things, an excellent survey of some of the results. Bloch, who teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics, is one of the leaders in the middle ...”

“... an erratum slip: on page 200 we learn of a book on feudalism by that great French Medievalist Maurice Bloch. The reference note gets it right.) The book begins with the co-existence of the cyclical and the linear, of repeating phenomena and the march of passing time, and notes the pervasive presence of both in our consciousness and patterned ...”

“... to German Jews, being made of stone, stand out. Vienne-le-Château to the south-west is where Marc Bloch was posted in 1915. His war diaries convey the boredom of war work behind the lines, with nothing to read and no sense of what was going on elsewhere. ‘I had little comprehension of the battle,’ he wrote. ‘It was the victory of the Marne but I would ...”

“... and his young widow and five children went to live with her great-aunt at the château of Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, thirty miles north-east of Lyon, a house with an immense garden, mountains in the distance and country all around. This was the true home of Saint-Exupéry’s childhood, and in retrospect the happiest, perhaps the only happy, time of his ...”

“... theatrically over the warriors was a valuable part of a knight’s intellectual equipment. As Maurice Keen points out, heraldry was ‘one of the prime keys to a secular chivalrous erudition that was at once literal and visual, practical and ideological’. Dr Keen’s book is a brilliantly successful attempt to describe and explain this secular ...”

“... an account of the early life of a brilliant, ebullient, generous-hearted young man (Proust’s Bloch came to mind) who, much to his father’s disgust, marries an equally expansive Macedonian girl, travels east to New York with her, and becomes a professional philosopher only to discover in the wearisome ecstasy of his married life and after reading Moby ...”

“... since his days as a young Situationist. More surprising are powerful statements from Ernst Bloch, who gives Clark his minatory title, and Samuel Beckett, who underscores the alien aspect in Cézanne that intrigues Clark. Above all, as Clark debates these others, he argues with himself, and though he often gathers his readers into the ‘we’ of his ...”

“... although obviously it is open to several interpretations, some kinder than others. Evelyne Bloch-Dano, the biographer of Jeanne Proust, thinks her subject’s forgiveness is ‘contradicted by the mock warning’. I don’t think it’s contradicted, but clearly there is something about the postscript that makes it a sort of mockery, probably just a ...”

“... the road and stay away. In 1791 the gateway opened into a yard, with sheds where wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a low-ceilinged room ...”

“... have come to a summary end in 1945 but for the absurd amateurishness and procrastination of Sir Maurice Peterson, the British Ambassador to Istanbul. If Peterson had acted more quickly or had even addressed his letter to the right man, Philby would never have had time to destroy the Russian defector, Volkov, who was about to shop him. As Cecil adds, with ...”

“... romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered Henderson as ‘very loud-voiced, very insistently Scottish, and constantly singing’. During the two years he spent in Cambridge before the Second World War bore him off to North Africa, Henderson flourished as ...”