David Denby

1. Article · Aug 31, 2026 · David Denby

   “The Barman of the Ritz” Is No “Casablanca” (opens the original)

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   In Philippe Collin’s international best-seller, “The Barman of the Ritz,” no one orders Scotch on the rocks. Or Scotch neat. Or, for that matter, bourbon in any form. Anyone displaying such pedestrian tastes would immediately be expelled from the room. Collin’s novel is set during the German Occupation of Paris, from June, 1940, to August, 1944, and it unfolds almost entirely from within the famous Petit Bar, in whose mahogany-and-leather depths French celebrities and German officers see

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2. Article · Aug 10, 2026 · David Denby

   Hannah Arendt’s American Education (opens the original)

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   Hannah Arendt arrived in New York in May, 1941, stateless, broke, and far from fluent in English. A German Jew exiled first from Germany and then from France, she had crossed the Atlantic on a Portuguese refugee ship with her husband, Heinrich Blücher, a working-class former Communist street fighter and largely self-taught intellectual. She was thirty-four and he was forty-two. They had individually fled Germany after the Nazi seizure of power; they met in France in 1936, married four years lat

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