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"Critic, essayist, translator, philosopher: Walter Benjamin maintains his position today as one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectuals. His work stimulates a profusion of responses in the form of novels, operas, films and artworks, as well as a never-abating production of academic texts. In this new biography, Esther Leslie uses the recently published entirety of Benjamin's correspondence as well as his numerous diaries and autobiographical Works in order to provide a meticulous and intimate account of his circumstances and thoughts. She sets his life in the context of his middle-class upbringing; explores the social, political and economic upheaval in Germany before and after World War One; and recounts Benjamin's eccentric love of toys, pop-up and lift-the-flap books, travel and ships. Seamlessly interweaving biographical details with an accessible yet concentrated account of Benjamin's intellectual development, Leslie draws a colourful portrait of a capacious intellect trapped in increasingly hostile circumstances." "Following Benjamin to Capri, Ibiza, Riga, Moscow, Paris and finally the Spanish border, where he dies while attempting to escape the Nazi occupation of France, Leslie challenges the populist depiction of the intellectual as a tragic and lonely figure, and restores the subject to his proper place as an artistic combatant and a relisher of experience."--BOOK JACKET.
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