Search Results

“... Rebecca West and the pioneers of British ‘New Feminism’, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt (the last two, both openly hostile to feminism, qualify on the grounds that as ‘trouble-makers and rule-breakers’ they lived the feminism they repudiated). As the narrative approaches the present, a bevy of feminist writers who came of age ...”

“... to Goldman Sachs (Clinton) or not knowing exactly how many properties they own (David Cameron). Hannah Arendt remarked in On Violence that rage is less commonly provoked by injustice than by hypocrisy. The difficulty is that politics must involve some degree of hypocrisy, if public and private life aren’t to dissolve into each other. ‘Be the change ...”

“... would take its cue from 1776 rather than 1789 or 1917 (there is some dispute as to whether Hannah Arendt was in the audience, nodding with approval). The Cuban revolution, Castro said, owed its success to the excesses of Batista’s secret police – twenty thousand extrajudicial killings in the 1950s alone – and to the fact that the Fidelistas ...”

“... as well as to many of the most important works of 20th-century social theory, from Max Weber to Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault: guilt and innocence are rarely as easily distinguishable as we might like them to be. This is what it means for a problem to be systemic. Bad things don’t happen simply because bad people intend them; and good people often ...”

“... may seem (do seem to me) especially remarkable: the trilogy on ‘female genius’, represented by Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and Colette (1999-2002), and the wonderful novel about Teresa of Avila, Thérèse mon amour (2008).Jardine says her book is not a hagiography, and it isn’t. But she does see Kristeva as offering a model of ‘how to live a ...”

“... exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention ...”

“... that world of the spirit which his intellect told him was the highest habitation of man.’ And to Hannah Arendt in 1962 (I owe this to Carol Brightman, the incisive McCarthy scholar) she chortled over the conceit that Dwight was a hoax, or a species of ambulant practical joke, on himself and others. ‘Quite a funny idea ...’ she wrote, ‘that Dwight ...”

“... model of even-handedness. She also does justice to the great friendships of McCarthy’s life with Hannah Arendt and Hardwick and Nicola Chiaromonte, and the smaller ones with figures like the aged Bernard Berenson, and the aborted ones with figures like Nathalie Sarraute. The book’s last major episode before the final act is supplied by the 1980 ...”

“... provincialism and latently brutal intolerance. Embodied in a Hitler or Himmler, we have what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. That, not the brooding genius of Wagner or the Superman, is the real problem of the German mind. And it raises both moral and artistic problems. How do we bring, say, the VW beetle (tellingly affectionate ...”

“... necessarily be dissolved into an impersonal continuum of multiple intimacy, the intimacy which Hannah Arendt claimed as a comparatively recent invention, and one which the novel was only just learning how to use and embody. Novelists, says Furbank, have steadily grown more intimate with their characters, and ‘it is above all to intimacy that ...”

“... us. Nirenberg illustrates how deeply entrenched anti-Jewish attitudes are through the case of Hannah Arendt. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany herself, she seems an unlikely example. Yet she insisted that Jews were ‘co-responsible’ for anti-Semitism because of their outsized share in capitalist exploitation, drawing on statistics that, as ...”

“... to George Eliot and George Lewes, from geishas to the secret mistresses of Catholic priests, from Hannah Arendt and Heidegger to Maria Callas and Battista Meneghini. ‘What all these women have in common is that they have been either mistresses or concubines,’ Abbott writes, structuring her book as a series of vignettes: ‘the budding philosopher ...”

“... who do have ‘the tremendous EGO’ required to do the work? Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Alice Munro, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Carson. Why am I even making this list? By the end of the book, I felt for Flaubert. ‘The humid element’, the ‘tears, chatter, breast-feeding … menses’, was too much for me, too. I was more ...”

“... means – what it had meant for a medieval saint, for example, or what it would come to mean for Hannah Arendt. But he knows what he means. Evil is whatever crosses the path of our ideas of goodness, shadows our mind, confounds our impulse to optimism. It is not, usually, something we are likely to do or have done to us: it is a thought, a memory of all ...”

“... the anti-totalitarianism of an older generation of intellectuals, including Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt, to be dismissed as Cold War propaganda. The gap widened between the anti-Communists of the 1950s, many of them disillusioned former Communists such as Koestler, Manès Sperber and Ignazio Silone, and the anti-anti-Communists of the 1960s, and ...”