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“... of Middle Eastern power politics in general. Two writers appearing under the pseudonym Ruth Freeman now claim to have located the solution, if not the murderer, in one of the most obscure and unpredictable places of all – the Mukhabarat, a branch of the Iraqi secret service dealing with opponents to the Hussein regime. The story begins in ...”

“... are, in part, by-products of the furore that was generated in 1983 by the publication of Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth and I had better declare where I stand. I have known Derek Freeman for nearly forty years. I consider that his criticism of the work of the ...”

“... originally relegated to the tenth chapter, but who arrived in the next instalment, by Mary Wilkins Freeman, to drop what the editor later termed ‘a bomb-shell on our literary hearthstone’. Strenuously resisting Howells’s characterisation of the aunt even as she took unexpected charge of the plot, Freeman initiated the ...”

“... preoccupied him for forty years, including many more in Samoa than Mead ever had. Derek Freeman argues that in being ideologically committed to representing Samoan emotional (and sexual) life as ‘graceful, easy, diffuse’, Mead did not face up to the true nature of this dignified, authoritarian and punishing society. Essentially he is concerned ...”

“... 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. Though both of these visions of the anthropologist have a certain plausibility, they hardly justify the tendency of recent biographies, particularly of Mead, to create ...”

“... unplaced grace of the most complete fragility,’ she gushed in a letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. ‘You’ve no idea how moving six feet four of vulnerable beauty is. He gets all the points, is extraordinarily sensitive to people.’ Mead and Fortune set up camp on the shore of Lake Chambri near Bateson’s field site, and began a four-month ...”

“... in old Daimlers, we might also be in a typical detective story of the period, expecting, say, Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French to look in at any moment. Technically, what has to be explained is the disappearance of the bohemian and not over-scrupulous poet Hugo Headley. His clothes are found on the shore, but he is known to be a strong swimmer ...”

“... Telford’s bridge over the Menai Straits, the Roeblings’ Brooklyn Bridge, and bridges by Freeman Fox over the Severn and the Bosphorus. A suspension bridge also provided what is probably – because recorded on film – the most widely publicised of all civil engineering failures, the collapse in 1940, owing to wind-induced oscillations, of the ...”

“... Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman, a right-wing Australian anthropologist, set off a brief frenzy in the culture wars when he tried to argue that her Samoan fieldwork was botched. But the more damaging criticisms have come from anthropologists to Mead’s left. They blame her for ...”

“... and scurvy. Rather it recalls the brief era, sure to end badly, of treasure hunts, demagogues, Ruth Etting and electric fires in the form of Scottish terriers. Stamp quotes Paul Oliver’s Dunroamin, a rare study of the suburban semi published in 1981, which pointed out ‘the cleverness of the composition of the standard semi-detached pair, in which ...”