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The Collected Topics explain the basic logical procedure and the main philosophical notions as preparation to the use of debate in the study of the five great texts of the Ge-luk curriculum. This chapter shows how debate provides the central scholastic methodology in the Ge-luk tradition, examining its relation to pedagogy, logic, epistemology and Madhyamaka. In discussing the final point in this training, the Geshe examination, the author again draws on his own experience. Ge-luk students first encounter the great Indian texts that support Tibetan monastic intellectual life in their study of the Ornament, which initiates them into the art of reading commentaries. At the same time, students also start to use the debate system they have learned previously while studying the Collected Topics. One of the striking features of debate is its emphasis on analysis and critical thinking.

Few figures have been so renowned and yet so critically dismissed within the history of literary modernism as Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. For a time in the early 1920s they were the leading personalities of London’s immediately post-war modernist haut bohemia, and the embodiment of the modernist avant-garde as it was perceived in the popular imagination. One of the reasons for their disappearance from histories of the emergence of English modernism, is perhaps that the Sitwellian brand of avant-gardism was so distinct from the classicist aesthetic standard by which modernism would subsequently come to be defined. This chapter examines a cult of “ornamental modernism” in the 1920s, of which the Sitwells were the figureheads; an impulse that we find in works that embrace the extravagant, the theatrical, or the eccentric; that turn to the decadent, baroque, and rococo rather than the classical for their models, that foreground artistic celebrity rather than impersonality, and in which performance and façades dominate rather than formalist clean lines or the direct articulation of subjective consciousness. It is an alternative trend in experimental art that overtly positions itself in antagonism with the conservative artistic and cultural tendencies of the period, but that also sits awkwardly in relation to the standard and revisionary histories of avant-garde and modernist experiment, exemplifying instead an ornamental aesthetic that has been all but obliterated from subsequent literary and art history.

The sexes (male, female) differ in parasite load and immune defences. In general, males are more frequently infected and often have lower defences. The differences are one consequence of sexual selection, where females invest more in maintenance. Females can choose males based on signs (e.g. ornaments) of higher resistance to parasites. Several theoretical scenarios can explain part of this variation. Advantages also result from genetic heterozygosity. Sex-specific hormones affect immune defences in many ways.

Josephine Baker was a sensation when she first performed her danse sauvage as the finale to La Revue nègre in Paris in 1925. The chapter describes Baker’s formation as a performer in the United States, and shows how the interaction between her showbiz background and the modernist aesthetic of one of the show’s producers, the Swedish ballet impresario Rolf de Maré, led to the “Africanization” of her vaudeville training. What emerged in Baker’s dance was a style that was both new and distinctively modern, born of a European fantasy of authenticity crossed with her aesthetic pragmatism. Baker’s subsequent success is described. Siegfried Kracauer’s essay on the Tiller Girls dance troupes, “The Mass Ornament,” is invoked to provide an analysis of a different type of popular modernist dance. The chapter ends with Baker’s failed return to the United States and her transformation into a more mainstream music-hall star.

This chapter recounts the author's first and subsequent meetings with Dorothy Wrinch. She also describes reading The Grammar of Ornament (1956), the first book to be printed by chromolithography, and how she began seeing symmetry everywhere, even teaching a course on it.