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“... you can write: He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show “still”.’ David LeviStrauss believes that ‘photographs by themselves certainly cannot tell “the whole truth”.’ But he knows what they can do, and he is always looking for the photograph that can show ‘still’. Where ...”

“... In their French editions the titles and covers of Lévi-Strauss’s books are often designed to tease as well as to inform. They deserve attention. Tristes Tropiques is about tropes as well as tropics; Mythologiques is about odd kinds of logic as well as mythology; La Pensée Sauvage carried on its cover a picture of a wild pansy which should have warned the English publisher that The Savage Mind was hardly an adequate translation even if the author chose the latter title himself ...”

“... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...”

“... were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation came to adulthood during World War Two, and ...”

“... of ‘wisdom’ is a case in point, but the same can be said of the anthropologist (Claude Lévi-Strauss), the historian (Georges Duby), the sociologist (Pierre Bourdieu), not to mention the scientist (Jean-Pierre Changeux) or even the poet (Yves Bonnefoy). Today, the Collège de France is the stuff intellectual dreams are made of. Academia has displaced ...”

“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... those who support Save Britain’s Heritage know only too well. We live in a retrospective age and David Lowenthal’s discursive study is a product of it. One of the attractions of this book is that it enables the Melton Constables of the world to be seen in the context of the future as well as the past. David Lowenthal is ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.The ...”

“... is met best by music which still bears traces of representation, operas of Wagner, early Strauss, and Debussy. Still? Still bears traces? Only Mr Harbison could have read the history of western music back to front, seeing it presumably, as a movement from the tone poems of J.S. Bach to the nearly pure abstractions of Till Eulenspiegels lustige ...”

“... modernist artists but also crucial to the subsequent development of structuralism by Claude Lévi-Strauss and others (Lévi-Strauss, alas, didn’t share their modernist commitments). In effect Bois used Russian Formalism to break the hold of the American variety; it also launched him on a central line of inquiry. Russian ...”

“... Propp we did not know what folk-tales had in common; after him, we cannot tell them apart,’ Levi-Strauss said of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk-Tale. If the sexualidentity theory made men and women all but indistinguishable, Brain Sex makes it hard to imagine they belong to the same species. What would men ...”

“... As Lévi-Strauss might have said, ‘the dead are good to think with.’ But the thoughts they give rise to are seldom as reassuring as one might hope. The dead, and memories of the dead, as both these books suggest, are disruptive, unruly and unpredictable. In his erudite study, Avner Ben-Amos has three cracks at analysing the way French society from the Revolution to the present has tried to come to terms with its most illustrious bodies ...”

“... forgetting that the most severe attack on Structuralism has come from Derrida’s chapter on Lévi-Strauss in De la Grammatologie and the chapter on Jean Rousset in L’Ecriture et la Différence: where Derrida says that Structuralism may be interpreted ‘as a relaxation, if not a lapse, of the attention given to force, which is the tension of force ...”

“... Grob, says ‘The Big Heat is finally Lang’s American pendant to the German Mabuse.’ And David Kalat, author of an excellent book on all the Mabuse incarnations, says that Debby, the character played by Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat, ‘is key to understanding Lang’s worldview, key to understanding the Mabuse genre’.Certainly The Big Heat offers ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”