“... could provide the constant supply of fresh air desired by many sleepers: the Norfolk clergyman James Woodforde took thermometer readings every night to ensure his bedchamber was suitably cool. Fires – like bedwarmers – ensured a warm bed but could give off noxious smoke, as well as posing more significant risks. Scents and soporifics could make ...”

“... context of Java and Indonesia. Not long before there had been a heated debate in Encounter between Clifford Geertz and the Swiss journalist Herbert Lüthy. It took place between late 1965 and early 1966, when communists and their sympathisers were being massacred in Indonesia after the attempted coup of 1965. Lüthy had started it by writing an essay on the ...”

“... hero of the same novel? What of Frieda’s remark that Lawrence identified with both Mellors and Clifford in Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Even with the life alone, the massive accumulation of evidence, together with Lawrence’s complex and unstable emotional history, makes it progressively harder for a modern biographer to make concise judgments. Early ...”

“... and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking advantage of the new freedom from studio contracts, he was one of the first actors to arrange to ...”

“... agricultural labourers, fantasist and (in Mount’s semi-serious conceit) a 19th-century avatar of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. One of Jefferies’s favourite haunts was Liddington Hill (now within the official town boundary of Swindon), with its remains of an Iron Age hill-fort and famous clump of beech trees, Liddington Clump. Visiting ...”

“... have opted for third-person narration, fertile territory for Jamesian negotiations of perspective (James being the writer whose effects he most admires). A stronger sense of a social web, and of the claims of belonging, has been evident, particularly in The Spell (1998), where domestic intimacy as well as pleasure-seeking was part of what the characters wanted ...”

“... culture have borrowed freely, especially from Victor Turner and Darnton’s acknowledged mentor, Clifford Geertz, whose principal concern has been with culture as a system of meanings, as, in Geertz’s phrase, an ‘acted document’. But the historian faces problems the anthropologist does not. His material is fragmentary and fixed. It cannot be questioned ...”

“... than public actions: he had fallen in love with Helen, the daughter of his mentor the journalist James Ashcroft Noble. Thomas’s devotion to Helen was fuelled by his wish for independence from his family, and by his hopes of cutting a dash with his contemporaries, but it rapidly brought him responsibilities of a more constricting kind. Although he and Helen ...”

“... In​ 1957, in a remote village on the south coast of Bali, the young anthropologist Clifford Geertz was watching a cremation ceremony spill down a hillside when the crowd suddenly parted, ‘as in a DeMille movie’, and there, propped up on her walking stick, stood Margaret Mead. She was on her way to India for ‘a World Conference on some sort of World Problem’, and had tracked down Geertz and his wife on her ‘notoriously bad ankles ...”

“... life there. Three quite different figures in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre ...”

“... on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his supersubtlety, not ...”

“... For students of the human sciences, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is, with Clifford Geertz, one of the few Americans who has achieved the status of a name to conjure with alongside the French maîtres à penser, particularly when the conversation turns to the topics of ‘Big Men’ (power-brokers who aren’t chiefs, masters of the games of speech and generosity), or the socially embedded economy of premodern societies, ‘negative reciprocity’ (exchange characterised by hard bargaining, predation or theft), the cultural apperception of colour, or why Americans don’t eat dogs ...”

“... politics, he neglects the roles and resonance of the monarchy in this society. As John Belchem and James Epstein have shown, there was also an influential language of rights and constitutionalism that was British-wide and British in emphasis. When a radical named Joseph Gerrald, on trial for his life, told an Edinburgh jury in 1794, ‘You are Britons – you ...”

“... talk to Gödel about the incompleteness theorem and he talks to me about the religions of Java,’ Clifford Geertz told Regis. The Institute is also a place to study the nature of originality and what nurtures it. The old men of the Institute can look back thirty, forty and fifty years. To have got there they have to have done at least ‘two important ...”

“... shadow looming over some of the classics which have been most influential among modern historians. Clifford Geertz’s treatment of the Balinese cockfight as a novel or a play, Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘self-fashioning’ or Foucault’s notion of the Greek Self as a ‘stylisation of freedom’, produced out of an ‘aesthetics of existence’. When Simon ...”