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“... mean male adulthood. But it is not only youth that gives Hamlet the stance of a man on the edge. Hannah Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: ‘I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society.’ Hamlet lives in that ‘today’. Revenge makes of the revenger not an active man but a ...”

“... Truants, his memoir of working at Partisan Review, William Barrett remembered Schwartz dismissing Hannah Arendt as a ‘Weimar Republic flapper’.In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was published in December 1938, shortly after Schwartz’s 25th birthday. As well as the title story and ‘Coriolanus and His Mother’, it contained ‘Poems of Experiment ...”

“... is worth pausing here. This is not the vague image of an eternal, unchanging, anti-semitism, which Hannah Arendt warned against as placing anti-semitism beyond the reach of history and politics – and which always involves a claim for its inevitable recurrence, stoking a regime of perpetual, ineffective fear. Anti-semitism belongs in time. There is a ...”

“... discovered Walter Benjamin through reading an essay by Gershom Scholem, and more thoroughly in Hannah Arendt’s introduction to Illuminations. Montage and the disjunctures of photomontage are the structuring principles for the handful of paintings on which Kitaj’s reputation rests, many of which seem like drawings coaxed into colour. The same can ...”

“... of his work. In her 1970 study, On Violence, addressed in part to Fanon’s student admirers, Hannah Arendt pointed out that both his followers and his detractors seemed to have read only the first chapter – also entitled ‘On Violence’ – of The Wretched of the Earth. There Fanon described how violence could serve as a ‘cleansing ...”

“... that of politics. The most trenchant consideration of this issue is probably to be found in Hannah Arendt’s celebrated, if controversial essays of 1968 and 1971, ‘Truth and Politics’ and ‘Lying in Politics’. ‘The deliberate falsehood and the outright lie, used as legitimate means to achieve political ends,’ she soberly notes in the ...”

“... to rely on. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews appeared only in 1961, much to Hannah Arendt’s good fortune but too late for the prosecutors putting their case together. They had to rely principally on two earlier works, one of which, Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, can’t have given them, or a would-be biographer, much ...”

“... cruelty, has its source in a fraudulent boast. Not that this makes it any less of a threat. As Hannah Arendt argued, it is illegitimate and/or waning power that turns most readily to violence. Is harassment a form of violence? I have lost count of the number of times people have expressed outrage at the mere suggestion of a proximity, on the grounds ...”

“... and defines his humour as deriving from ‘emotional paralysis’, was written before Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanours, films which arguably brought together in a more acceptable form Allen’s ‘cosmic kvetching’ and his nice appreciation of the tragic ironies of ordinary lives.There has now been an even more profound ...”

“... were Mexican on paper, but cast adrift in an unfamiliar environment they were closer to what Hannah Arendt and her generation would have described as ‘apatrides’. Phoenix lay under a dull sky. It was early morning, with few signs of life, when we left. We picked up State Route 85 at Buckeye and headed south through a magnificent valley strewn ...”

“... tragedy were in no way destined to repeat themselves as farce. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarked that ‘those whom the persecutor had singled out as the scum of the earth – Jews, Trotskyites etc – actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere.’ She was writing about the ‘denationalisations’ of the 1930s under ...”

“... having been shoved inwards, left most of the Carol Line on the wrong side.What to take​ ? Hannah Arendt took her mother. They passed through the front door of a house in Germany and left by the back door, which was in Czechoslovakia. Freud took his couch. Einstein took his violin. Brecht left Finland through ‘a small door’ high up in ...”

“... Epigraphs strewn from Tolstoy to Monty Python by way of Bismarck and Bagehot, Foucault and Arendt, are less than value-added. Such pretensions aside, however, van Middelaar produced something rare in the literature on European integration: an attractively readable account of it. The account, moreover, is powerful and original, fruit of the distinctive ...”

“... of a violent dictatorship that sees any questioning of the official position as a crime. Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism grows not out of a passion for big ideas, but out of indifference, the atomisation of society and contempt for any form of political participation. The attempts by parts of the Western media to portray Putin as a ...”