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Sour Plums

John Lanchester, 26 October 1989

The Letters of John Cheever 
edited by Benjamin Cheever.
Cape, 397 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 224 02689 5
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Mary McCarthy 
by Carol Gelderman.
Sidgwick, 430 pp., £12.95, March 1989, 0 283 99797 4
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The company she keeps 
by Mary McCarthy.
Weidenfeld, 246 pp., £4.50, October 1989, 0 297 79649 6
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... and kicking, giving offence and charming people. One person to whom McCarthy gave offence was Hannah Arendt, with whom she had an exchange at a party (again) at Philip Rahv’s (again) flat in 1945. ‘Amazed that Hitler was so uncomprehending as to have longed for the Parisians’ love during the German occupation ... McCarthy said that she felt ...

Trump’s America, Netanyahu’s Israel

Adam Shatz: Actually Existing Zionism, 9 May 2019

... last year, aged 94. But these ‘Zionists’ do not represent actually existing Zionism. In 1948, Hannah Arendt, whose critique of territorial Zionism owed much to Ahad Ha’am, warned that after the Arab-Israeli war the ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by a hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, preoccupied by ...

Who knew?

Norman Stone, 20 November 1980

The Terrible Secret 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 262 pp., £8.95, September 1980, 0 297 77835 8
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... hostages. But even with the qualification, and even if we strip the question of the overtones Hannah Arendt gave it, does it not still ...

Marseille, 1940-43

Neal Ascherson, 18 July 2013

... of German, Austrian and Eastern European anti-fascist celebrities: Heinrich and Golo Mann, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Simone Weil, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the ...

I was warmer in prison

Vadim Nikitin: ‘A Terrible Country’, 11 October 2018

A Terrible Country 
by Keith Gessen.
Fitzcarraldo, 352 pp., £12.99, July 2018, 978 1 910695 76 0
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... of a new Russian socialism decoupled from Soviet nostalgia. This time, when Gessen brings up Hannah Arendt, it is not to furnish a metaphor for a drunken hook-up but for the tortured relationship of an émigré to the country of their birth. Early on in Andrei’s year in Russia, he meets Moscow’s liberal opposition at Jean- Jacques, a restaurant ...

For and against Romanistan

Nicholas Xenos, 22 August 1996

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey 
by Isabel Fonseca.
Chatto, 322 pp., £18.99, October 1995, 0 7011 3851 3
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... or ‘devouring’, solely on the basis of their race. There is a sad irony in the story retold by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem of a question raised with the prosecuting counsel by the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, who asked: ‘Would the death of the Jews have been less of an evil if they were a people without a culture, such as the Gypsies who ...

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

... the prospect of nuclear war. The shift undoubtedly came in 1963 with the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, which set in motion an intense public interrogation of Jewish conduct during the Nazi persecution. Imperceptibly, a chillingly apt but descriptively neutral term coined during the war itself ...

A Heroism of the Decision, a Politics of the Event

Simon Critchley: Alain Badiou, 20 September 2007

Polemics 
by Alain Badiou, translated by Steven Corcoran.
Verso, 339 pp., £17.99, November 2006, 1 84467 089 9
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... of politics, his taste for dictatorship is hard to accept. The liberal protestations of Hannah Arendt notwithstanding, I sympathise with the idea that the problem of politics is the formation of the general or generic will, of a popular front, what Marx called ‘an association of free human beings’. But surely this shouldn’t lead to an ...

Leader-Bashing

Robert Service, 24 January 1991

The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 
by Richard Pipes.
Harvill, 946 pp., £20, December 1990, 0 00 272086 8
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... espoused by Richard Pipes was popularised by political scientists like William Kornhauser and Hannah Arendt in the Fifties. The leader tells the Party; the Party tells the masses; and the masses do what they are told because they are anomie, untutored, irrational crowds. By the same token, Lenin the totalitarian knew exactly what he was doing in ...

The Trouble with Nowhere

Martin Jay, 1 June 2000

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy 
by Russell Jacoby.
Basic Books, 256 pp., £17.95, April 1999, 0 465 02000 3
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Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905-40 
edited by Catriona Kelly.
Penguin, 378 pp., £9.99, September 1999, 0 14 118081 1
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The Faber Book of Utopias 
edited by John Carey.
Faber, 560 pp., £20, October 1999, 9780571197859
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The Nazi War on Cancer 
by Robert Proctor.
Princeton, 390 pp., £18.95, May 1999, 0 691 00196 0
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... of Nazism does not really add weight to Jacoby’s lament. Perhaps the main problem, as Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago in The Human Condition, is that utopianism is grounded in the kind of political thinking that relies on the model of man in the singular as homo faber, who can fabricate his world, rather than men in the plural as political ...

Holocaust Art

Robert Taubman, 10 January 1983

Schindler’s Ark 
by Thomas Keneally.
Hodder, 432 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 340 27838 2
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... Goeth of Plaszow – display the same indistinguishable Ordinariness as Adolf Eichmann, to whom Hannah Arendt devoted her ‘Report on the Banality of Evil’. What makes them so fantastic is reckoning their ordinariness against their deeds. The accounts are no help in understanding them, for they can only be represented as unbelievable. Lalka’s ...

Why go high?

Adam Shatz, 19 November 2020

... Nature a Violent Society?’ (1968), her critique of the racism ‘inherent’ in American life, Hannah Arendt wrote:the real danger is not [Black] violence but the possibility of a white backlash of such proportions as to be able to invade the domain of regular government. Only such a victory at the polls could stop the present policy of ...

Rwanda in Six Scenes

Stephen W. Smith: Fables of Rwanda, 17 March 2011

... is open to question and, indeed, bears re-examination. ‘Freedom of opinion is a farce,’ Hannah Arendt wrote in 1966 in ‘Truth and Politics’, ‘unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.’ The problem with Rwanda is not only that opinions and facts have parted company but that opinion takes ...

Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood: Brecht’s Poems, 21 March 2019

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht 
translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Norton, 1286 pp., £35, December 2018, 978 0 87140 767 2
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... cheque, an advance abolition of the need for forgiveness. But these moments are remarkably rare. Hannah Arendt says one of Brecht’s ‘great virtues’ was that he ‘never felt sorry for himself – hardly ever was even interested in himself’. The person he called ‘poor B.B.’ feels like a character in one of his plays, and we hear the ...

Sock it to me

Elizabeth Spelman: Richard Sennett, 9 October 2003

Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality 
by Richard Sennett.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, January 2003, 9780713996173
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... puzzles, presences’. Impersonality, as Sennett understands it (acknowledging a debt to Hannah Arendt even while offering what he takes to be a corrective to her views), does not keep people of different racial or ethnic or economic backgrounds from engaging fruitfully with one another; on the contrary, it prevents robust social relations from ...

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