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“... more also about the para-political myths of rural and urban life (George Sand and Flaubert) or the Walter Benjamin myth of Paris as the capital of the 19th century. Gildea ends his account on a happy note: French political myths of both Left and Right are, he thinks, alive and well. Indeed, French political traditions have, in his view, been recently ...”

“... works by key Marxists beyond the Channel: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Debray, Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, Bobbio and many others; and 2) making NLR as internationalist as possible in the problems it addressed. From 1974 I started to read NLR from cover to cover and was profoundly re-educated in the process. Here I came into contact with the work ...”

“... chunks of it, or the wisdom and know-how which come from having been in the game a long time. Walter Benjamin saw it as the stories which the old recount to the young, and its disintegration in modern times seemed to him one of the most grievous forms of human poverty. The warning that experience is fading from the modern world is sounded all the way ...”

“... Bosphorus (seven out of eight quarto volumes of steel engravings), the works of Homer, Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and so on and on and on. Not exactly a treasure trove, but getting so many books at once, with so few titles I would have chosen, moved me suddenly much closer to possession of my fantasy library. Some of the books were hard going – I never got on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rationality was to play into the hands of the savage enemies of reason who murdered his friend Walter Benjamin. But reason was part of the problem as well, which only a certain dialectical or deconstructive style of thought could unlock. How could one retrieve that otherness that Western reason has suppressed without falling prey to a barbarous ...”

“... out. It’s not the same: the reasons are quite different. In an eerie anticipation of this story, Walter Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem conducted just this sort of argument over a metaphor Benjamin had used about Kafka’s work. Kafka’s characters are students who have lost the scripture, ...”

“... no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint.’ It’s easy to see why unsteady, disappointed people would be attracted to such a ...”

“... through the formulation of critical theory, to the exile of Horkheimer and Adorno, the suicide of Benjamin, and Adorno’s eventual repatriation to serve as the Janus-faced figurehead of the 1977 German Autumn, well … it was exactly what I needed. I’ve never warmed to Clapham Common much: the area immediately beside Clapham Old Town is a gloomy scrag-end ...”

“... the Art Nouveau designer resisted the effects of industry, even as he also sought, in the words of Walter Benjamin, ‘to win back its forms’ – modern concrete, cast iron and the like – ‘for art’. There is no such resistance in contemporary design: it delights in post-industrial technologies, and it is happy to sacrifice the semi-autonomy of art ...”

“... boring conferences by scoring ‘ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin’. The words aren’t said in Summer, but Benjamin’s idea of messianic time lies at the heart of Smith’s faith in art and the imagination. Writing in the 1930s ...”

“... of bare life was precisely an exception, even if it has sometimes threatened to become the norm (Walter Benjamin thought so in 1940). For Heller-Roazen, on the contrary, homo sacer was one of many subjects stripped of standing. He isn’t even the lowest of the low, for he cannot be enslaved.In his final section Heller-Roazen turns to the realm of ...”

“... while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings which might be released only in their afterlife, as they came to be read in as yet unforeseeable situations. He thought much the same about history in general. The past itself is ...”

“... notions of justice, while believing that we can’t get on politically without such ideas. Like Walter Benjamin, he is a compulsive collector of theoretical odds and ends, since in our current confused conditions you can never know which of them is going to come in handy. His book is too much a compendium of other people’s work, too doggedly ...”

“... subject of photographic reproduction and the authenticity of the artefact, she quotes passages of Walter Benjamin. The justification for this is, again, that the narrator is an art historian, and this is her diary. But Patricia is not very interesting in her professional capacity and what she offers are mostly critical commonplaces: for example, she ...”