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“... 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 ...”

“... or certain aspects of it – against the opprobrium under which it usually falls. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, her mentor in such matters, she sketches out a distinction between two contrasting types of kitsch – the nostalgic, which is bad, and the melancholic, which is good. The nostalgic is characterised by a fantasy of keeping the past alive in ...”

“... receptivity rather than activism. Far from imagining a revolutionary popular art, as Brecht and Walter Benjamin had in different ways done in the 1930s, Adorno elaborated an aesthetics of suffering, in the senses both of passivity and pain: ‘Authentic works are those that surrender themselves to the historical substance of the age without ...”

“... they have been the winners in the past century’s intellectual disputes about representation. Walter Benjamin, in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, took issue with a notion of the symbol that he saw as debased because it was no longer a theological complex of material and transcendental elements but just ‘a relationship between appearance and ...”

“... There’s a gauntness to his long, oval face, with its high forehead and downward-turned Walter Benjamin moustache, a settled sadness in his eyes; and though he is not tall, he is thin, and the overall impression is of the concentrated narrowness of a figure by Giacometti. He would look this way for the rest of his life.In a talk on Radio 4 ...”

“... of ‘declensions’ of artists and ‘constellations’ of critics (this last echoes Walter Benjamin). ‘This book is an inventory of encounters,’ Bois tells us at the outset. ‘It takes two to tango.’ Often, though, more than two are involved. He begins with an intimate account of a discursive throuple that he enjoyed with the English ...”

“... with Arthur Hallam and the conservative society of Cambridge Apostles. Deliberately borrowing from Walter Benjamin on the 20th century, Armstrong identifies the Monthly Repository group with ‘a politicised aesthetics’ and the Apostles with ‘an aestheticised politics’. But she has no sooner traced these circles than she characteristically ...”

“... the Parisian street-café (with due homage to the voyeurism of Baudelaire as mediated through Walter Benjamin), and an uncritical hurry to endorse Richard Sennett’s anxieties about the collapse of public life and modern man’s retreat into privacy. What all these cultural interventions in the urban core are meant to deliver is ...”

“... works by drawing parallels with cultural authority figures ranging from Kierkegaard and Kafka to Walter Benjamin and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The comparisons are invariably resonant, yet often feel poorly integrated: they should either have been more punctual and suggestive or else more elaborately developed. Menzel’s Realism is a passionate book, at ...”

“... days and nights of a scene that flickered for a few years and then burned out. In his memoir Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry writes: ‘There circulated, in the Sixties, the legend that Thomas Pynchon read only the Encyclopaedia Britannica; it was even said that much of the erudition in V. came out of the N-O volume of that great ...”

“... never see her again. They have exchanged glances, that’s all – love ‘at last sight’, as Walter Benjamin said. A captain returns to the small town where he served in the army, talks for a while with his old orderly in the presence of a guard who is sitting outside the barracks. The captain is mesmerised by the guard, and has to work hard not to ...”

“... in the future beyond warning that it is likely to be unpleasant if we do not change our ways. Walter Benjamin thought that the Jewish prohibition of graven images included a refusal to make a fetish of the future. There is remarkably little utopian speculation in the work of the Jewish Marx, who viewed his task not as sketching a blueprint for the ...”

“... Open City, Julius visits Brussels and meets a young Moroccan named Farouq, an autodidact who reads Walter Benjamin during his shifts working at an internet café. When Farouq insists that ‘the Palestinian question is the central question of our time,’ the test by which liberalism consistently fails to prove its commitments to democracy and ...”

“... all process, like an abstract expressionist canvas, or like the pure ‘mode of intention’ that Walter Benjamin envisioned linking the different languages of the world in ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). This, of course, makes Pagolak untranslatable – indeed, any version of a Pagolak sentence in a foreign language will conceal rather than ...”

“... and inconsequence. Love in a Life offers anecdotes in search of a narrative. Death, as Walter Benjamin implied, gives life to stories, and intimations of mortality recur in Motion’s anecdotes. The opening poem evokes, with hallucinatory vividness, a dream-vision of ‘last century’s man ... / (spats and port waistcoat / in clackety ...”