When one has spent—or mis-spent—substantial fractions of many years in gathering materials for a study and has eventually seen the results published in book form one is strongly conscious of a need to forget; at the very least there is a wish not to live in repetitious ways. An ancient Arab proverb, possibly relevant here, runs something like this: the word you have spoken is your master; the word you have not spoken is your slave. And so it is with my book The Gift Relationship which I sub-titled From Human Blood to Social Policy.