“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was unfathomable – a regression to the intercommunal violence of the British Mandate. But, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the ‘current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible … is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that gives rise to it is untenable.’ Instead of ...”

“... during the seventeen years he lodged for long periods at 36 Craven Street, just off the Strand, Benjamin Franklin became addicted to what he called his ‘air bath’. Every morning, he would strip naked, throw open the windows and pass half an hour reading or writing in the nude, before dossing down refreshed for another hour or so, sometimes answering the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feeling the need to pledge allegiance to one or the other. Leskov is the titular protagonist of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’, where the critic offers internet-anticipating insights into the incompatibility of storytelling and its modern mass-produced counterpart, information, which expresses itself too plainly to allow spaces for ...”

“... but I wanted something bigger, broader, deeper, and I wanted to know about Marx and Hegel and Walter Benjamin – I had a crush on Benjamin, actually, as a result of the essay with which Hannah Arendt introduced her selection of his work in Illuminations, and Susan Sontag’s ‘Under the Sign of ...”

“... and slavish too – heigh ho, one more artist who seems only just to have read the usual bit by Walter Benjamin. (What would a work by a reader of Simone Weil be like?) I certainly feel this about the obsession with the fine art tradition that fuels a lot of contemporary art: oh no, not another work that exposes the maleness of Abstract ...”

“... just the adviser the country needed. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy considered making Walter Lippmann his ambassador to Paris, but Schlesinger told the president he was more useful in the papers. When Lippmann visited the Oval Office on 8 November 1962, Ronald Steel tells us in Walter Lippmann and the American ...”

“... family and reassuring world of cook, nanny and governess that Elias describes remind one of Walter Benjamin’s near-contemporary ‘Berlin Childhood’, except that where Benjamin provides a rich description of bourgeois consumption in the Belle Epoque, Elias offers surprisingly little material detail, given the ...”

“... appeared in 2017, the journal was indifferent: there was no enthusiasm, presumably, for Walter Benjamin’s idea that melancholy was a meditative pathway for the left as it toiled from one disappointment to the next; or for Traverso’s tautological sense of loss about the impossibility of old-fashioned left-wing mourning.The left had shed a ...”