Richard Pithouse -
And then, despite the fear, I set off
I put my cheek against death's cheek
− Roberto Bolaño, 'Self Portrait at Twenty Years', The Romantic Dogs, 2006
On the 26th of September1940 Walter Benjamin – a brilliant writer struggling to the point of being short of paper, an intellectual acutely attuned to the poetic, Jewish and, in his own way, communist – found himself, for the second time in his life, in desperate flight from fascism. On the border between Spain and...