Illuminations

From the evidence of this book I would suggest that Benjamin was one of the great European writers of this century

Philip Toynbee, Observer

He explained the modern with an authority that fifty years of unpredictable change have not vitiated

Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books

Like Baudelaire, Benjamin brings the very new into shocking conjunction with the very old … He is in search of a surrealist history and politics, one which clings tenaciously to the fragment, the miniature, the stray citation, but which impacts these fragments one upon the other to politically explosive effect, like the Messiah who will transfigure the world completely by making minor adjustments to it

Terry Eagleton