He was curmudgeonly about the level of spin that journalists were putting on Verdi 'celebrations' during his lifetime; the present levels of spindom would have him gnawing the woodwork.

Okay, I said. If we take turns with the dishes. I'm not going to do them all the time. Fair's fair, Matt said. We rotate the dishes, and Jon and I do our own laundry.

The house had a projecting window, where the poet [Percy Bysshe Shelley] loved to sit with book in hand, and catch, according to his custom, the maximum of sunlight granted by a chary English summer.

In reporting here on his recent visits to the village of Kaixiangong, Fei Xiaotong presents the views of one of China's most noted social anthropologists on recent changes in the Chinese countryside as reflected in the village he first studied in 1936. Through a projected series of visits to Kaixiangong over the next several years, Fei hopes eventually to provide an update to his classic book, Peasant Life in China, first published in 1939.¹⁴ Kaixiangong has recently been designated a field research station, and new Chinese graduate students in sociology will have an opportunity to conduct field research in that village and its surrounding region.