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“... Jack Goody took early retirement from the prestigious post of William Wise Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is now in a highly productive phase of his career. Indeed, if Cambridge University Press had not put many of his recent writings into a single series, it would be hard to keep track of all the things he has been up to ...”

“... but they are by now, all of them, in academic retirement. Of the cohort which follows them, Jack Goody is one of the leading figures. In Eastern Europe, there is a joke about the current generation of Communist leaders which says that its coming was predicted in the Bible: ‘Then came a generation which knew not Joseph.’ ...”

“... For the time being, we must be grateful that they are content to share them with the rest of us. Jack Goody has already drawn on the newly-rich store of anthropological reference to produce wide-ranging, thought-provoking books on the relationship between the spoken and the written, the connections between cooking and social class, and the development ...”

“... meddle with each other’s subject-matter. Nonetheless, this publication is a new development, for Goody is dealing with one of the most familiar places and periods of traditional history: Europe from the decline of the Roman Empire to the Reformation. The very scale of the enterprise is revealing. Covering such a long period and such a diverse but ...”

“... on Exmoor, in the Reformation. History writing now is as heterogeneous as it has ever been. Jack Goody, however, is not satisfied. The deformations of a Eurocentric whiggism, he believes, are with us still. Historians who were writing around the middle of the last century – Moses Finley on the ancient world, Joseph Needham on ‘science and ...”

“... our own, contemporary, terms? It is surprising to feel on occasion the same kind of unease with Goody’s The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive. This is just the latest in a series of studies by Goody (five lengthy books in the last ten years) which have explored the relationship between anthropological and ...”

“... the relevance of history for anthropology and vice versa, but not much action. Exceptionally, Jack Goody’s latest book, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), represents an ambitious attempt to evaluate historical sources through the eyes of a social anthropologist, while Alan Macfarlane has changed sides and now prefers to be ...”

“... between 1919 and 1930 were born the modern – one might also say pre-Post-Modern – masters: Jack Goody (1919), Victor Turner (1920), Mary Douglas (1921), and Marshall Sahlins (1930). Right in the middle came Clifford Geertz, who was born in San Francisco in 1926. In the quarter-century between 1960, when he published his masterly The Religion of ...”

“... as the antidote: Oh! give us once again the wishing-cap Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the forest with St George! The move from wonder to instruction might seem an inevitable consequence of the move from oral to literary tales. But even a highly literate tale like Alice in Wonderland cannot be ...”

“... West Asian/North African – belonging to the two major branches which the social anthropologist Jack Goody has taught us to recognise, the African and the Eurasian. Therborn prefers a ‘geocultural’ division to one based on religion, since, as he sees it, geoculture generally prevails. Hindu and Muslim family practices in North India are similar but ...”

“... label of ‘public intellectual’. His peers were figures such as, say, the anthropologist Jack Goody or the social theorist W.G. Runciman – theorists of great conceptual and empirical range, but not primarily contemporary political and cultural commentators – rather than media-friendly academics such as Hugh Trevor-Roper or A.J. Ayer. The ...”

“... of print, for example, bears the impress of his collaboration with the Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody, and his analysis of the development of family structure in early modern England shows the influence of conversations with the historian Peter Laslett. For Watt, as for several other literary critics of his generation, the traditional ...”

“... Charlie Wilson, the sort of father you see by the hundred in France on Sunday outings ... [Gordon] Goody, nerves of steel and the wolfish handsomeness of the pack leader ... The events were so vividly in the minds of the actors that they remember, like Henry V at Agincourt, what feats they did that day.’ Never mind Agincourt, note the ‘little man’ and ...”

“... survived just because it has been reduced to insignificance. In a famous retort to Lévi-Strauss, Jack Goody once remarked that the persistence of certain dishes might be explained not by their symbolic meaning, but their indifference to it, as simple pegs of existential continuity. The same could, of course, be said of many features of dress. This is ...”

“... his pals from the neighbourhood, maybe a crony from the Scranton Tribune, and my Finnegan uncles, Jack and Boo-Boo, settled in at the kitchen table. They’d sit in the spreading afternoon light talking sports and politics. These men were educated, informed and eclectic – and they loved to debate. They’d argue local politics, state politics, world ...”