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Died. Robert Stephen Briffault, 72, hawk-nosed novelist, anthropologist and World War I surgeon; of tuberculosis; in Sussex, England (where he recently arrived after a 20-year self-imposed exile in France). A British-born Anglophobe, Briffault left medicine for the social sciences, in 1927 writing The Mothers, an exhaustive study of matriarchies, and in 1938 scornfully castigating his country in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Britons were too soft to survive). His novels (Europa; Europa in Limbo) presented European upper-class society as too diseased to be worth saving...
...group also has rights to Robert Briffault's translation of existentialist Jean Paul Sartre's "Huis Clos." The three-character play was put on in London last season under the title "The Vicious Circle" and met with wide acclaim...
These Seminole ways confirm Robert Briffault's assertion in his great study of matriarchies, The Mothers, that patriarchal marriage and the patriarchal family are "relatively late products of social evolution." Mother-dominated societies came first. Big reason: among primitive folk, sexual relations are often so free that only a child's mother is identifiable...
FANDANGO-Robed Briffault-Scribner's ($2.50). Because a few years ago many reviewers would not call a rotten book rotten-or couldn't get the scent-if its politics were Left, Anthropologist Robert Briffault developed an extraordinary reputation through his first novel, Europa, scarcely diminished it with Europa in Limbo. Robert Forsythe wrote of him, in New Masses: "I not only consider him the most brilliant writer in the English language today but by long odds the most learned and profound man of our time." Briffault's third novel, Fandango, is shorter and a little less pretentious...
Author of the best-selling novel Europa, Robert Briffault was born in London 62 years ago, practiced medicine in New Zealand, was twice decorated during the War. When the Munich Pact was signed, he returned his decorations to the King. Under its grand title and despite isolated passages of startling invective, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire seems petty, and its criticism is so undiscriminating that readers may fear Briffault would not like the English even if they were good...