Radio Benjamin

A complex and brilliant writer. – JM CoetzeeWalter Benjamin was one of the unclassifiable ones… whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre. – Hannah ArendtBenjamin buckled himself to the task of revolutionary transformation. his life and work speak challengingly to us all. – Terry EagletonThere has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time. – George SteinerHe drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe. – Susan SontagWalter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of the twentieth century. * Sunday Times *Radio Benjamin could hardly be bettered… There really is no parallel for what Benjamin did in these talks. Imagine a particularly engaging episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time narrated by Alan Bennett - if Bennett were more profoundly steeped in Marx and politically engaged by the revolutionary potential of the medium of radio - and you have something of their allure. – Stuart JeffriesThis collection shows a lighter - though entirely characteristic - side to this most influential of 20th-century thinkers. – Jonathan Gibbs * Independent *Walter Benjamin, one of the first theorists to ponder the social impact of mass media […] was equally entranced by the way thin air mysteriously transmits radio waves. In 1927, five years before he exiled himself from Germany in advance of the Nazi putsch, Benjamin began a series of experimental broadcasts on this new medium. – Peter Conrad * Observer *

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.