Fintan O'Toole on the writers who understand power
Starting with Arendt
Fintan O’Toole is a political writer and drama critic for The Irish Times, a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, a winner of the Orwell Prize, and a professor of Irish letters at Princeton. This is taken from an interview in the NYRB titled “Theater, Politics, and Critic.”
I grew up with the cold war and in that very divided intellectual climate where you had, on the one hand, the evils of Stalinism and, on the other, the United States doing terrible things in Vietnam, Cambodia, and then in Latin America. You were supposed to choose between them.
It was crucial to me to discover writers who forced you to think more broadly and deeply about the way power worked in the world: Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, George Orwell, Susan Sontag — all those who were at once urgently engaged and undogmatic.
Previous: Pauline Kael on collaborating with evil.