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“... 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 ...”

“... the evasiveness of Heidegger and his apologists. As for anti-Semitism, in 1933 Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt that he was ‘as much an anti-Semite today as … ten years ago’; nothing personal of course, but given that, as he told Karl Jaspers, there really was ‘a dangerous international band of Jews’, it was obviously necessary to protect the ...”

“... of the latter. One way to achieve this was established in the era of imperial expansion, when, as Hannah Arendt puts it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘these two superfluous forces, superfluous capital and superfluous working power, joined hands and left the country together.’ The outcome of this in the first era of globalisation around 1900 was ...”

“... afford golden visas and fast-track applications. To one group, citizenship means everything. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the supposed universalism of human rights can only be guaranteed through citizenship: something she knew first hand as a stateless refugee. To the other group, citizenship is something you can buy. But these distinctions are not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw deal. There is no entry on Katharine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Nancy Spain, Helen Gurley Brown. Agony aunts get an even rawer deal: Marje Proops, Anne Landers and Dear Abby are firmly ...”

“... a myth of shared ground will allow us to find whatever ground we share. The work of James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Fred Dupee, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson – these are some of the names Mrs Trilling mentions – gave the myth one of the best runs it has had anywhere. The language of the myth looks a little ...”