“... to work their brains with a furious and rigorous discipline in order to be ready to receive it. Hannah Arendt once said of Isak Dinesen that her tales read as if they had been boiled down until they were pure essence of story, and then boiled down again: and much the same could be said of Muriel Spark, albeit from a very different philosophical ...”

“... whom he meticulously relayed news from the Kent Evening Post and the Sheerness Times Guardian were Hannah Arendt, Christa Wolf, Max Frisch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. When, in 1978, Jürgen Habermas asked Johnson for an essay for a book he was editing, provisionally titled Observations on ‘The Spiritual Situation of the Age’, Johnson ...”

“... as their fathers had rebelled against their own parents’ religiosity. Without such young men, Hannah Arendt wrote, Freud would never have come up with the Oedipus complex, which is at least a suggestive overstatement. And without their wealthy fathers, Adorno, Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Friedrich Pollock would ...”

“... is close to dismissive of a socialist alternative, and leans heavily on the critical liberalism of Hannah Arendt (certainly no socialist). For Hickel, though, the tradition of democratic socialism – radical redistribution, public ownership, decommodification and decolonisation – provides at least a working answer to the questions of power and ...”

“... the mind of a man, but carried out by thousands of fanatics’. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt found that for an avant-garde of French intellectuals between the wars it was ‘not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade’ whom they read, and that ‘to them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost ...”

“... time whose chance rhythms offered more than the Hegelian teleology she rejected, agreeing with Hannah Arendt that writers wrote, not to express themselves, but to communicate with a scattered community of friends, finding more hope in ‘the meaningfulness of the world’ than she had in the past. She was able to abandon the fixated role of ...”

“... to the New York Times in December 1948 signed by 29 Jewish eminences, including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook, as the leader of a movement ‘closely akin … to the Nazi and Fascist parties’ which had ‘boasted’ of its massacre of innocents and inaugurated ‘a reign of terror’. Less than thirty years later, Begin was prime ...”

“... Translated: don’t blame me, I’m the one who became media-friendly. As banalisations go, Hannah Arendt might have had some words for it. Far from being an impediment, however, Annan’s performance over Rwanda was in a way a condition of his further ascent. The Clinton administration, gearing up for intervention in the Balkans, was determined ...”

“... The flâneur, as Benjamin saw him, walked about the Parisian arcades of the 19th century, but as Hannah Arendt pointed out, he did so as if they were an extension of his living-room: he deliberately blurred the line dividing inside from outside. Something similar happened with adda in Calcutta in the 20th century; it either took place in ...”

“... about the only Jewish intellectuals who openly associated themselves with Israel before 1967 were Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky. Only one in twenty American Jews had visited Israel. But as Novick makes clear, all this changed after the Arab-Israeli War in 1967: the Holocaust was ‘discovered’ by American Jews, the Holocaust industry began to ...”

“... brief essays – dealing with the way capitalism crushes the bodies and souls of workers. When Hannah Arendt read it in the 1950s, she thought it was the best thing ever written on the subject.In August 1936, Weil crossed the Spanish border and made her way to Barcelona. There she managed to join a group of international volunteers in the small town ...”

“... anti-apartheid activists and opponents of the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal.As Hannah Arendt pointed out, to have ‘the right to have rights’ a person must belong to a political community, the surest proof of which is having the proper papers. Kaminsky learned this as a child. His parents were Russian Jews who met in Paris in ...”

“... one lecture, on Hegel I think, Raymond Geuss paused and launched into a poem he later published on Hannah Arendt: ‘She lived as a hausfrau/thought as a hausfrau/and died/as a hausfrau/doing the shopping.’ I find Arendt as intellectually exciting as cold toast. But hausfrau? Really? When I think of it now, I’m ...”

“... the most civilised country on earth, but also the most boring!’ was the verdict of Hannah Arendt in 1952; ten years later Natalia Ginzburg, visiting London, would have agreed: ‘England is never vulgar. It is conventional, but not vulgar … the English rarely surprise.’ The class system had much to do with the stolidity of the British ...”

“... philosophy than drama, as he tests arguments from the Scottish Enlightenment against those of Hannah Arendt, who anticipates the errors of neoliberalism by wanting to put the marketplace outside politics. The main analysis starts from lines in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon where the unhappiness of the Atreidae – Agamemnon and Menelaus – about the rape ...”