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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and its real ability to alter them.’ Storia Notturna is still dedicated, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, to the history of the vanquished. But now the accent is on the simple perdurance of popular beliefs, across any number of social structures and through every kind of historical and civilisational change: they are anchored in the operations ...”

“... the portrayal of a bourgeois society at its height, Fortunata and Jacinta sometimes brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades’ study, which traces the interconnections of the manifold social and cultural innovations of Second Empire Paris. Both Galdos and Benjamin produce a composite portrait of the experience of ...”

“... And Marlowe is quicker with jokes about ‘The Killers’ and ‘Prufrock’ and lines from Walter Bagehot and Suetonius than a truly plain-speaking private dick ought to be. When the drunken novelist tells him that good stuff is written fast, and that claims to the contrary are ‘a lot of mish-mash’, he says: ‘It didn’t come easy to ...”

“... scene came to pay homage to the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he ...”

“... their own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a ...”