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“... are of awesome voluptuousness. Oh, that coconut kirsch roulade in the first issue! If, as Lévi-Strauss once opined, ‘to eat is to fuck,’ then that coconut kirsch roulade is just asking for it. Even if the true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels ...”

“... than the one 1933 film; but it is true that even this Mabuse can look like a crazed counterpart of Walter Benjamin. When ‘the man behind the curtain’ in The Testament, the figure issuing instructions to the gang, is revealed to be a gramophone, the detective formulates his discovery in an interesting way. ‘You have been listening,’ he says to the now ...”

“... nonsense that seems to possess most of them, and he quotes some redolent exemplars. There is Bruno Walter, seeing Mozart as an ‘open, trusting soul’: a ‘happy, simple-hearted young man’, a benign fantasy that Hildesheimer brusquely banishes to the realm of wishes. There is Bernhard Paumgartner, who thinks that after Mozart’s rupture with his ...”

“... without frames, and Rauschenberg often photographed them among everyday things. As the curator Walter Hopps commented, they also underscore ‘the fact of a new urban surface’. Nevertheless, the two series do share an essential operation in negation. After two White Paintings were exhibited in September 1953, Cage offered this litany: ‘No subject/No ...”

“... Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, de Man, Barthes). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American exception is Chomsky, who revolutionised the study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser ...”

“... 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 where we live, with ...”

“... nevertheless become inevitable in a period when thinkers like Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss had made their own diverse and challenging contributions to a possible science of literature. However, it was not as an overtly ‘scientific’ critic, as a builder of systems, that Genette presented himself in the first two collections of Figures (1966 ...”

“... of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by petty bureaucrats and insufficiently supported (or recompensed) by his patron. After five years he went back to Munich. The wealthy cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler moved to Weimar in the opening years ...”

“... In the mid-1950s, when Murphy’s Law wasn’t yet widely known under that name, Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, reflecting on the political and administrative troubles afflicting him, suggested that ‘a new law of knowledge’ be recognised and called Strauss’s Law after him: ‘If anything bad can happen, it probably ...”

“... those flames ... the idol of Nazi arsonists and murderers’) the charge is the same. As Bruno Walter put it in a letter to Furtwängler in 1949: ‘The presence and activity of a musician of your standing in Germany at that time lent those terrible criminals cultural and moral credibility, or at least helped them considerably in its acquisition.’ Three ...”

“... probably see this as regressive humanism, but, after all Barthes’s references to Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss et al, it is both refreshing and touching to encounter his mundane talk of people having rows and being in a mess and the corresponding view of the meaning and value of cinema and response to that. The best moments in Casino, after all, are the rows ...”

“... the names given to horses – not ordinary horses . . . but racehorses,’ writes Claude Lévi-Strauss, opening an excursus on equine onomastics in The Savage Mind. The names of thoroughbreds are ‘rigorously individualised’ and ‘rarely, if ever, describe them’. What counts is the way they can be seen to derive from the horse’s pedigree. They form ...”

“... large the paintings do look very much at home in these vaulted spaces. It could well be, as Michel Strauss suggested while we were standing in the biggest space, that Picasso’s art always tends to look at home in spaces akin to those of Medieval churches. Indeed, it seems to me that at the Tate many of the late paintings look as if they are Medieval ...”

“... culinary traditions are handicapped by excess reverence, almost all French scholars – Lévi-Strauss for one – are handicapped by blank ignorance, often of what British diet is, and almost always of what it means to its consumers. Not that British scholarship has made things easy for the French, or anyone else. The classic history by Drummond and ...”

“... government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they ...”