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All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake…

As a sample of moral fineness on the part of Miss Arendt’s critics, I offer the following sentence from Abel’s piece: “If a man holds a gun at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend, the man with the gun will be aesthetically less ugly than the one who out of fear of death has killed…

No Gentile who was an adult in the years of the Final Solution can read Eichmann in Jerusalem without some remorse and self-questioning. American Jews, far from the scene then and now, may feel certain misgivings too, reading the book, especially the richer ones who paid large sums of money to the …

I freely confess that it gave me joy and I too heard a paean in it—not a hate-paean to totalitarianism but a paean of transcendence, heavenly music

On the other hand, contrary to what Abel says, Miss Arendt never presents him as a “dutiful clerk”; his work was important, indeed crucial, in the Nazi scheme, and he could feel that he, as an individual, was making a significant contribution to the Fuehrer’s task. He may or may not have conceived …