“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In the early 1960s a spectre was haunting New York, the spectre of banality. Hannah Arendt was publishing her articles on ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ in the New Yorker, and the mostly Jewish intellectual community associated with Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary was appalled by her notion of the ‘banality of evil ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story). He spent some of his senior year at the Sorbonne, met Hannah Arendt and travelled to the Black Forest with her letter of introduction to meet Martin Heidegger (Malick’s translation of The Essence of Reasons was published a few years later). After graduating in 1965 he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... near the Pyrenees in a ‘women’s camp’ in Gurs, which had been holding refugees from Spain. (Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora were also interned at Gurs, while Benjamin had spent several weeks in Vernuche.) As the Germans advanced deeper into France and the administration reeled, evasion or negotiated exit became a brief ...”

“... abstention from waste’. John Updike referred to ‘the stirring purity’ of Kafka’s prose. Hannah Arendt, as well, wrote that his work ‘speaks the purest German prose of the century’. So although Kafka was certainly Czech, it seems that fact is superseded by his written German, which is apparently the most pure – or, shall we ...”

“... guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. The seer is Hannah Arendt, in the 1950 preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism. When she wrote a new preface to the book in 1966, and looked back for a moment at her original judgment, she was a touch apologetic. The Origins had been drafted between 1945 and 1949, and ...”

“... theories of democracy advanced by Pareto, Michels and Mosca (and still fashionable in the work of Hannah Arendt). These theories are based on the assumption of apathetic masses who allow themselves to be led by experts. Here, his own credentials to speak were impeccable. The active part he had played when forming and organising the American Committee for ...”

“... is no evidence that the prospect of punishment deters would-be perpetrators of mass atrocities. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, ‘no punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely ...”

“... After all, sex and violence are two experiences that tend to leave people lost for words (Hannah Arendt described violence as ‘mute’). In McBride’s hands, they re-find their natural affinity, together precipitating a crisis of speech. She is the writer of sexual abuse, now recognised as one of the hallmarks of the new century. In The Lesser ...”