“... ease of a novel. Again, the range is imposing – Raymond Queneau, Roland Barthes, E.M. Cioran, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Gay’s Art and Act, The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse – the casual erudition much in evidence. Updike is a master at summing up careers: from the letters of Kafka, Joyce, Flaubert and Hemingway he ...”

“... was ‘still to be determined’. But his peers refused to accept even this minimalist defence. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a sustained denunciation of Sartre at the end of La Pensée sauvage, insisted that the purpose of anthropology was ‘not to constitute, but to dissolve man’. Not long afterwards, Foucault identified man as the invented object of ...”

“... off. In all three books, Derrida’s argument was that Western thought from Plato to Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss had been hopelessly entangled in the illusion that language might provide us with access to a reality beyond language, beyond metaphor: an unmediated experience of truth and being which he called ‘presence’. Even Heidegger, a radical critic of ...”

“... better book than her historicist claim leads us to expect; like another closet universalist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Warner establishes principles that apply far beyond her stated subject. Oddly, or not so oddly, it is Freudians, rather than Jungians, who attract her anti-archetypal fire. ‘An archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a ...”

“... a story – powerful cults, saturated with negativity – they might not behave themselves. As Claude Lévi-Strauss understood, every version of a myth, however distant or apparently contradictory, belongs to the myth; every retelling is owned by the story, not by the teller. Freud’s Oedipus isn’t just Freud talking about Oedipus, but one more ...”

“... the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. Released shortly after, he was whisked to the offices of his host, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French embassy’s cultural attaché. The FBI continued to monitor him throughout his three-month stay.‘I hate travelling and explorers’ was the famous opening line of Lévi-Strauss’s memoir ...”

“... century. Russian formalism haunted French structuralism, and not only because Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss worked together; Walter Benjamin’s thinking was often, perhaps always, inseparable from the turns his language took. Even the austere Adorno said that one could ‘hardly speak of aesthetic matters unaesthetically, devoid of ...”

“... be resolved is one I’ve treasured and admired for a long time. It belongs to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. He sketches it out in an essay called ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, and it underlies his magnificent four-volume series Mythologiques. ‘The purpose of myth,’ Lévi-Strauss says, ‘is to ...”

“... distinctively Indo-European’ – but only because it is, again, found in Mesopotamia. Claude Lévi-Strauss has answers for one, though not all, of these quandaries. In one stroke (in his essay ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’, in Structural Anthropology), he stopped the fight between historical diffusion and ...”

“... North African coast and headed in the direction of Martinique. André Breton was on board; so was Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both were wonderful raconteurs. There are caustic pen portraits of French and Soviet writers and politicians, and descriptions of other passengers. The forward section is ‘densely populated but maintains a chic tone because of a group ...”

“... Times asked various people to reflect on what the moonshots had meant to them. One of them was Claude Lévi-Strauss. ‘I never look at TV except when there’s a moonshot,’ he said, and then I am glued to my set, even though it’s boring, always the same and lasts a long time. Still, I can’t turn away. In this sad century, in this sad world ...”

“... have its own special shameful melancholy, imperceptible to everyone except Istanbullus and maybe Claude Lévi-Strauss, sounds to me like an invitation for a bunch of self-important lugubrious dudes to sit around doing nothing and feeling like they’re fulfilling their Hegelian role (if only Hegel applied to the East).In response to the question about ...”

“... thinker. The closest she came to writing about a grand system-builder was a short early review of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and this was a mistake she might not have made had she known him then as the architect of French Structuralism rather than the eccentric bellettrist of Tristes Tropiques. There is no Kant, no Nietzsche, no Marx in Sontag ...”

“... which was remaindered after only a few months. It was the first English translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955), which had been a best-seller in France and was already recognised as a highly original masterpiece by many professional Anglophone anthropologists. One reason for the failure of A World on the Wane was that ...”

“... even more subversive than his former allies.In​ 1946, Wright accepted a formal invitation from Claude Lévi-Strauss to visit France. When he and Ellen arrived in Paris with their young daughter, a reporter asked him whether the ‘black problem’ was close to being resolved in America. ‘There is not a black problem in the United States, but a white ...”