“... built environment with the functions of representing ourselves to ourselves as culturally alive? Walter Benjamin theorised a state of distraction in which we function ordinarily without noticing the buildings around us, and he thought of this as a state of happiness, of not needing to pay attention to what we have made as something other than natural ...”

“... but intellectual and cultural. The word today suggests the Bauhaus, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Walter Benjamin, the great photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar theorist Siegfried Kracauer and the artist Hannah Höch. One could as easily ...”

“... than a trace of the sadomasochistic nastiness sometimes sensed in Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. Walter Benjamin once speculated that the early Disney films were so popular because ‘the public recognises its own life’ in the trials Mickey and Donald are made to endure, and that their primary lesson is to teach us how to survive a civilisation become ...”

“... down the second law of thermodynamics? . . . The matchless incandescent spirit of the man!’ Walter Benjamin thought a philosophy that couldn’t account for fortune-telling by means of coffee grounds couldn’t be a real philosophy. Many have thought just the reverse, of course. One mention of coffee grounds and the like, and we are no longer ...”

“... a drug memoir called Narcotics: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine and Ether (1932). Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Antonin Artaud all gave it a try. In her memoirs Simone de Beauvoir described Sartre being haunted by visions of scuttling crabs for days after his experiment, but Jay writes that Sartre admitted ...”

“... to cultural practitioners. Osip Brik, a Formalist critic, played this role for Mayakovsky, as Walter Benjamin did for Brecht. The point about revolutions is that they get left-wing critics out of the house. The critic runs the workshop in which various poetic devices are tested and examined for potential flaws before being passed on to the poet. Even ...”

“... of Revolution than Mansfield Park does. Life can be a good deal more surreal than André Breton. Walter Benjamin considered that Baudelaire’s poetry reflected the urban masses of Paris, even though those masses are nowhere actually present in his work. Bertolt Brecht thought that realism was a matter of a work’s effects, not of whether it recalled ...”

“... sense of the overall narrative I read Ronald Hayman, J.P. Stern, Michael Tanner, Rüdiger Bittner, Walter Kaufmann, Leslie Chamberlain and, yes, even Nietzsche on Nietzsche, Ben MacIntyre on Elisabeth’s Paraguayan adventure, and H.F. Peters on Lou Andreas-Salomé (some of the detail below is from these books rather than Diethe’s). Diethe’s answer to the ...”

“... Benjamin​ Moser begins his biography with a bang: ‘Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star.’ In my gaudier moments I prefer to think of Sontag as American literature’s first and last great screen star. Transcending staid text, she was projected into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn’t know Walter Benjamin from Walter Brennan ...”

“... as best it can. The rather ponderous narrative of this book is punctured by moments of what Walter Benjamin might have called profane illumination, accidental events that manage even so to represent strange epiphanies or conversion experiences. ‘Accident,’ Hamilton remarks, ‘rose to prominence as a site of self-transformation.’ Augustine ...”

“... the West since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title. Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx ...”

“... with which she filled them, retained something of the over-stuffed Fin-de-Siècle: rooms which, as Walter Benjamin said, functioned like the shell of a snail or an aquatic creature. A photograph taken in the early 1920s of one of Gray’s most important clients shows the persistence of this sense of interior design as envelope or carapace. Juliette ...”

“... that they can even open up new realms such as the ‘optical unconscious’ proclaimed by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. Today, however, machines often not only do the seeing for us but also act on the patterns they detect. Hence the advent of ‘operational images’ that ‘intervene in everyday life’, as Paglen puts it, images that have ...”

“... immediately. The next day a makeshift fence surrounded it. ‘Baudelaire loved solitude,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘but he wanted it in a crowd.’ Today any area that might attract a crowd has shut down and Governor Cuomo frowns on walks. You can still find ‘crowds’, but they’re made up of people you already know but can’t risk seeing ...”

“... has the spray of speech as it is actually spoken so drenched the reader to the bone,’ Walter Benjamin wrote of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). It is a braying novel that echoes with snatches of conversation, music wafting from windows and animals shrieking on their way to the slaughterhouse. Both Döblin and Jelinek ...”