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“... of Surrealism during the war years (he also launched a journal there, with Duchamp, Ernst and David Hare, called VVV). And though Bretonian Surrealism was opposed to abstraction, it helped American artists like Jackson Pollock develop an automatist gesturalism that was more expressive of the unconscious than any Surrealist dreamscape. Such was also its ...”

“... nothing so much as Lucky’s portering of the sand-filled suitcases in Waiting for Godot. Lévi-Strauss argued that history-writing was impossible given the indefinite divisibility of time and hence the arbitrariness of the temporal units adopted by the historian. This thought is unlikely to be much of an impediment to the practising historian, but it ...”

“... is critical only to Chapter Four of Islands. Most of Sahlins’s work is in the tradition of Lévi-Strauss, but instead of the doctrinaire structuralism of some of Lévi-Strauss’s followers that takes structures of autochthonous societies to be instantaneous and out of time, Sahlins studies how they change, and in ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... of white women.’Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary … I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure ...”

“... underside of the 1960s fixation on beautiful young people, the hangers-on and the left-behinds, as David Widgery once put it, ‘who hung on to the myths and … ended up in a mess’. It’s spooky the way Carter describes Honeybuzzard, with his ‘soft, squashy-nosed, full-lipped face’, his ‘new, very white, very frilly shirt’, and Ghislaine, with her ...”