“... works: how the law works, how the police work, how power works. His new novel, Big If, opens with Walter Asplund, a small-town New Englander whose main role in the story is to father two of its protagonists: Vi, a Secret Service bodyguard, and Jens, a computer programmer. But Walter has a symbolic significance, too: ...”

“... posing as radical in public while privately cushioned by family money or a spouse’s quiet labour.Walter Benjamin​ thought one key to understanding Baudelaire was to see him as someone who had to sell his wares in the marketplace. Why was it Benjamin who spotted this? Perhaps he saw his own reflection reproduced ...”

“... did at the time, but to relocate its exemplary form in a neglected episode. Long ago Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and other young Europeans had adopted overlooked structures like American grain elevators as emblems of a functionalist Modernism to come. In Delirious New York Koolhaas claimed another sort of American primitive as a prototype for a renewed ...”

“... of suggestions, in which political and personal motifs are inextricably bound up with one another. Walter Benjamin, whose suicide at Port-Bou is incorporated into the fiction, is also perhaps to be seen as the pervasive figure in this textual carpet. Quoted more than once in epigraphs to the various sections, he stands for a desire to fuse ...”

“... Wagner proleptically with the Holocaust is to go much further than Achebe, and further even than Walter Benjamin, for whom every document of civilisation was also a document of barbarism. It is to amputate unseemly and horrible experiences altogether from the realm of the human, and as such is a view incapable of development, argument or ...”

“... the fundamental motives for the civilising process that produced the modern middle class. And why Walter Benjamin, in his still challenging essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’, saw distraction and low-intensity, habit-driven behaviour (Ablenkung and Zerstreuung) as an antidote to the charismatic intensity of ...”

“... and Emily Apter, in Against World Literature (2013), connects his secular theology to that of Walter Benjamin. Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1892, took a doctorate in law at the University of Heidelberg, served in the army during World War One, took another doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Greifswald, was librarian at the Prussian ...”

“... us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week before through a tunnel under Harrods: the store’s security guards had just let her in on the secret. A third insisted there was only one ...”

“... for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus’ – The Arcades Project – ‘is curiously reminiscent of another great ...”

“... and immaterialised – by its surroundings.) Once upon​ a time, in the good old days of Walter Benjamin, I thought of writing a book called Paul Cézanne, A Portrait Painter in the Era of High Positivism. Its question would have been: How do human beings offer themselves to ‘portrayal’ in a culture where they understand themselves, and ...”

“... which he saw being rekindled in the National Socialist imagination – and with the concerns of Walter Benjamin, whose backward-looking ‘angel of history’ has been widely perceived as the emblem of a discontinuous age in which the past can be secured in the present only through a measure of aestheticisation. By 1969, Henderson was speaking with ...”

“... of experience, has thrown us out of kilter. Richards was thus one of the many critics – Walter Benjamin is perhaps the most celebrated – who recorded the death of experience or decline of bourgeois interiority in the late capitalist epoch. Like Leavis, he imagined that the effects of industry, technology and mass culture could be fended off ...”

“... as a manifestation of a philosophical project or even as an idea of personal identity, on Walter Benjamin, on Wallace Stevens, and on Faulkner. A couple of them originally appeared in the LRB, while others were twenty-minute talks for this or that event at which Cavell was appearing as a philosophical eminence, and in which he can sometimes seem ...”

“... the approval of the scholar and critic T. Sturge Moore. The painters with whom he consorted – Walter Sickert, William Rothenstein, Augustus John – chose to regard him as a poet. ‘The Fine Arts they imagined were already in good hands,’ he recalled in Rude Assignment (1950), his second volume of autobiography, ‘namely their own.’ But it was as a ...”

“... a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The Arendt cult is a riddle,’ Walter Laqueur sighed in the 1990s, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire had sighed before him. So much reverent attention for someone so ‘devoid of originality, depth and a systematic character’. Was it because women like reading other women, Laqueur ...”