“... didn’t get in his way in Washington and Moscow. Arguing with Mrs Thatcher, swapping ideas with Andrei Sakharov or with heretical Italian communists – that was fun. Remaining patient with stupid old dinosaurs like Erich Honecker or evil goblins like Ceaușescu was a penance. Gorbachev seems to have regarded the ‘fraternal ruling parties’ as, on ...”

“... reply to Berlin’s hatred of the Soviet system. A non-sequitur. Apart from anything else, it was Andrei Sakharov who educated millions of people to see the obviousness of the points I’ve just made.(Incidentally, and on a point that often gives rise to gossip, Ignatieff asserts that Berlin was as shocked as anybody by the surreptitious CIA funding of ...”

“... misfortune to have survived into the new age. Alone of the major dissidents – only Sakharov rivalled him in stature – he came back to the country from which he had been expelled twenty years before. The late Joseph Brodsky, asked in July 1995 if he would return, said flatly: ‘I don’t think I can. The country in which I grew up doesn’t ...”

“... lengths to divert Anna Politkovskaya’s funeral from the obvious venue of the Vagankovskoe, where Sakharov is buried, to a dreary precinct on the outskirts that few Muscovites can locate on a map. But how necessary was the precaution? The number of mourners who got to the Troekurovskoe was not large, perhaps a thousand or so, and the mood of the occasion was ...”