Claude Lévi-Strauss

Travel and travellers are two things I loathe,” wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss, as he lamented the popular travelogues of 1950s Paris, full of “insipid details, incidents of no significance . . . compiled with an eye mainly for effect”.

That introductory passage to his book Tristes Tropiques , translated as “A World on the Wane”, could have been the dismissive wave towards amateurs of a lofty intellectual giant, a man who helped define modern anthropology and not only spanned but symbolised the 20th century.