“... by the unreal, the deathly, the disguised, the predatory, the phantasmagoric? The famous tagline Walter Benjamin borrowed from Leopardi – ‘Fashion: Madame Death! Madame Death!’ – seems made for the world Ensor shows. ‘The Intrigue’ (1890) Look again at The Intrigue and Skeletons Fighting. What seems to me stupendous about them (and ...”

“... by falsification. Cadence becomes a falling away. According to this logic, lines of poetry are as Walter Benjamin describes the lines of the face – records, not of experience lived, but of our failure to experience: ‘The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the ...”

“... terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part’), but with good contributions from Walter Benjamin, and from the dependable Emerson: ‘Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.’ Here is the touch of wonder required for Rortian aphorism. It isn’t to be found everywhere among the thousands Gross gives us, but there is no dearth of ...”

“... that comes from these literary crimes creates a whole other self – he becomes a book collector. Walter Benjamin wrote of the different ways to acquire books: one could write them oneself, one could borrow them, ‘with its attendant non-returning’, one could buy them from catalogues, auctions or bookshops. He doesn’t mention stealing as one of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its fair share of clever rogues, and no one played the role with more self-conscious élan than Walter Serner, who compiled an aphoristic guide to succeeding as a con artist in a Europe roiled by social upheaval, economic chaos and political intrigue after the First World War. Born in 1889 to an affluent Jewish family in the Bohemian town of Karlsbad (now ...”

“... ten thousand women, hundreds with young children. Several were well known: Hannah Arendt; Dora Benjamin, Walter’s sister; Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of Lion; the actress Dita Parlö, whose character falls in love with Jean Gabin’s in La Grande Illusion; Lisa Fittko, a passeuse who risked her life guiding scores of ...”

“... Baudrillard admits to being indebted, the thinking particularly of the Frankfurt School and of Walter Benjamin. America, both the place and the book as he has conceived them, is invented to demonstrate that any theories that have not evolved as Baudrillard’s have done are now, no less than persons and people, an incumbrance. In several previous ...”

“... much of that urban ‘anxiety’ reflects the later experiences of influential eccentrics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault? Medical discourse may well, as Gill claims, have eroded tolerance of difference and deformity, and it may belong to the history of ‘attempts to define and police the parameters of acceptable diversity’. The scientific ...”

“... intriguing matters of interpretation. One of the tasks of the translator, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, apart from helping us to read texts we couldn’t otherwise approach, is to show what different languages allow their speakers to do with words – and also what those languages do not allow. A good case arises with Brecht’s short poem ...”

“... Canetti wrote of Grosz’s pictures. ‘I didn’t see a single communist in blue overalls,’ Walter Benjamin wrote of his trip to Moscow in 1926, ‘but I did see some guys who could fit in any George Grosz album.’ ‘George Grosz’s caricatures are actually not satire but realistic reportage,’ Hannah Arendt wrote. ‘We know these types. They ...”

“... Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew – or at Bluewater? No contest. Bluewater, the posthumous dream of Walter Benjamin, is the clear favourite. The Dalí painting from which the sculpture has been concocted was first shown in 1931. Title? The Persistence of Memory. Memory is the missing ingredient on the M25’s orbital circuit: Victorian asylums given over ...”

“... its linguistic imprecision, its mass of references (Blake, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Giorgione, Walter Benjamin, and more, and more) how deeply psychoanalysis is concerned with culture. Not only broadly, with culture as opposed to nature, but with culture in its narrowest sense – that is, high bourgeois culture. Easel painting, symphonic ...”

“... if only for a while, and only for a relative handful of readers. This is better than what Walter Benjamin calls God’s remembrance, since God, in Paley’s view, is another of those men who are always looking the other way. A character in one of her stories draws up an inventory of all her troubles. ‘The list when complete could have brought ...”