“... to think of the stories these volumes tell as evidence of religious beliefs and rituals, but, as Walter Benjamin points out in ‘The Storyteller’, when men and women are imprisoned in repetitive tasks, storytelling flourishes. He deplored the rise of information in modern times. ‘If the art of storytelling has become rare,’ he wrote, ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... form of Mike Davis. In his epigraph Davis situates himself and his ambitions with a quotation from Walter Benjamin: ‘The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives – motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A ...”

“... hints of spirit that seem to drift round certain street corners and hang in selected doorways, as Walter Benjamin did in his great Paris works and as imitated by Marcus in his book. And Savage, right enough, is man enough to have a bash: It is the early Seventies. All the participants of what will be called punk are alive, but few of them know each ...”

“... and (post)modern count as historical constellations that, like the ‘dialectical images’ of Walter Benjamin, stir us from the slumber of our historicist chronologies, as Nagel intends, or whether – as he fears – they are exercises in ‘historical telescoping’, a reprocessing of old artefacts in contemporary terms in a way that might play ...”

“... a series of covered galleries to the great dome housing the ‘St Peter’s’ of the swastika. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, the ‘aestheticising of politics’ was one of the hallmarks of Fascism, the creation of exhibition value for the masses. ‘History’ is ornamental and inflates nicely to fill the Halls of Fame that third-rate men erect for ...”

“... rituals and forms as well as the functions of German fascism, deepening our understanding of what Walter Benjamin called the aestheticisation of politics. If this is one stage Syberberg chooses to leave bare, that can hardly be because he finds it impossible to represent artistically. He does, after all, have a narrator talk us through Max Weber’s ...”

“... from which so many of its commodified exhibits came. It is the universe massively investigated by Walter Benjamin as the origin of what was later to be termed ‘la société du spectacle’. But ‘exposition’ also refers to a set of literary interests and methods, reflecting a new preoccupation with spatialised representation, a move away from the ...”

“... may be the final triumph of vulgarity over distinction, a fitting end for the faint of heart. Walter Benjamin spoke of the vulgarisation of art in the age of mechanical reproduction: maybe the same fate waits inevitably on the man or woman of talent who consigns personality or persona to a small bright box. Clive James provided a clue to his own ...”

“... world and their arguments and their idiocies pretty much as they do. You begin to read in what Walter Benjamin would call a state of distraction, rather than with your habitual concentration. Instead of being afraid of missing something you start enjoying what may be irrelevant, you lose all track of what relevance might mean. It’s true, as Nicholas ...”

“... not expect them to provide us with an ‘equivalent of’ their source. We should instead – as Walter Benjamin proposed in his visionary essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ – ask how the imaginative life of the source text has been prolonged, what has been done by the translation, what it points to, throws light on, or mimes. Take the first of ...”

“... that could easily have been entertained by any number of commentators on modern mass media, from Walter Benjamin onwards.This sharpened sense of limitation may account for the noisiness of 1930s fiction. The London flats occupied by the present-day Pargiters are enveloped in noise pollution: including, oddly enough, the old Victorian bugbear of the ...”

“... works: how the law works, how the police work, how power works. His new novel, Big If, opens with Walter Asplund, a small-town New Englander whose main role in the story is to father two of its protagonists: Vi, a Secret Service bodyguard, and Jens, a computer programmer. But Walter has a symbolic significance, too: ...”

“... critics and writers. Not only did he develop interests in film, science fiction, or the work of Walter Benjamin, say, earlier than most of his colleagues in the humanities, he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of ...”

“... cinema that charmed him, its combination of photographic realism and fantastic effect, or what Walter Benjamin called the ‘blue flower’ of sensuous immediacy produced through intensive mediation. As a child, Magritte contrived plays and pranks with a gang that included his two younger brothers and assorted neighbourhood pals, and he made home ...”