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“... of our predecessors, not as sudden or unforeseeable eruptions. Rather than being a ‘storm’, as Walter Benjamin described it, history is a perpetual process of sowing and reaping. Liberal democracy struggles to sustain authority under these conditions, because elections are experienced as mere staging posts in a historical longue durée, rather than as ...”

“... once again expressing his deep misgivings. For good measure he then suggested that, by alluding to Walter Benjamin, Trilling had descended to pretentiousness and name-dropping. It’s a petulant and childish swipe at both men, phrased in what seems meant to illustrate how real guys put high-flown intellectuals in their place: ‘Here one cries ...”

“... in the Twenties, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar ‘the German master of the small form’. In 1935, writing in honour of Polgar’s 60th birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: ‘He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary ... I have ...”

“... of. Alternatively, death can be seen as giving a unique authority to her fiction. In the words of Walter Benjamin, the storyteller used to ‘borrow his authority from death’ (‘there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died’), but in modern times, dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of ...”

“... Or, better still, of Giacomo Leopardi’s terrible Dialogue between Fashion and Death, from which Walter Benjamin chose the following line to epitomise his ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ (a line in which Fashion addresses its double directly): ‘Fashion: Mr Death! Mr Death!’ Or, best of all, of Malevich in 1923: ‘I envisaged the revolution ...”

“... Like Kant’s misinterpretation of the angel of Revelation 10, the angel in the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ stands between history and the future. He has come to end the destruction of what he would like to think are the last days. But he cannot. Time continues; history is not at a close; the winds of ...”

“... imagination can enter spaces made inaccessible by taboos enforced by race or colonial policy.) As Walter Benjamin pointed out in an essay on toys, the child’s imaginative world is partly a grown-up construct: toys are made for children by adults, who assign ‘childish’ meanings to them, which children do not always go along with. The ambiguities of ...”

“... The 19th-century way of putting it was to say that the ‘owl of Minerva flies at dusk’. Walter Benjamin puts it in a more 20th-century sort of way: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are ...”

“... in response to the charges made by his adversaries. He spoke less of Heidegger than of Levinas and Walter Benjamin, whose radical Jewish messianism struck a chord with him. Deconstruction, he now claimed, had always been about justice, all the more so for having been silent about it. He continued to pun – deconstruction, in French, would be nothing ...”

“... to live in it because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment. In an outstanding reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (which Benjamin never published), Eric Santner elaborated the notion that a present revolutionary intervention repeats/redeems failed attempts in the ...”

“... that ordinary people say and do extraordinary things. The portrait of Pritchett’s father Walter in the autobiographical volumes A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil shows his powers at full stretch. Walter Pritchett, as seen by his eldest son, was a figure of Micawberian optimism, opening a newsagent and ...”

“... after demobilisation, in 1919, to resume his part in a quartet of friendship with Howells, Arthur Benjamin and Arthur Bliss. His siblings had also to contend with his burgeoning fame, which they did not understand: two published volumes of poetry (1917 and 1919); much performance and publication of music (1920-22); another volume of poetry at the publishers ...”

“... out of the abyss. Limitations on length must have inhibited Helga Geyer-Ryan. Her contribution on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history is characteristically intelligent and dense (she thinks in German, which, in this context, is altogether an advantage). But her sketch makes use neither of the polemic correspondence between ...”

“... moment up on Instagram. It is they who now move into the kind of dilapidated prole areas Walter Benjamin and the Situationists once hymned, only to gentrify them with … the funky little coffee shops Patti Smith hymns throughout M Train. If M Train is a kind of celebrity psychogeographica, it’s one that old-world bohemians like Rechy, Genet ...”

“... not always the best quartet circles. Both musically and biographically, David Matthews and Eric Walter White are quite exceptionally well informed, and never get their facts wrong – even though they are not beyond getting their right facts mixed up. As we know from the recently published second edition of White’s Stravinsky: The Composer and his ...”