“... The resulting practice of theatrical – no, operatic – dissimulation was best caught by Isaac Deutscher in his study of the Scandinavian social democrat and all-purpose political conjuror and thug Trygve Lie. Yet there are honourable contrasts, such as Willy Brandt. In the whole of Brandt’s memoirs, the name Wilson is mentioned twice and then ...”

“... at what was now the CIA. (In a move reminiscent of Isaiah Berlin’s academic blackballing of Isaac Deutscher, Schlesinger would later try to out the historian William Appleman Williams as a communist to the president of the American Historical Association.) The Life article cost Schlesinger many of his friends on the left, but it won him new ...”

“... Communiqués in the Struggle for Truth are devoted to ‘pseudo-history’ as represented by Isaac Deutscher, G.D.H. Cole, D.F. Fleming (on the origins of the Cold War), and the American historian of the Soviet Union, Arch Getty. He polemicised against me too, as a Sovietological ‘revisionist’, though for some reason rather mildly, charging me ...”

“... played a complaisant part. And, in quite another key, I recall the death at about that time of Isaac Deutscher, who had done so much in the early years of the teach-in movement to remind the young that ‘the end of ideology’ was itself an ideological construct, and that there still existed factors such as class and power. (When he spoke at the main ...”

“... than the Nazis themselves, Israeli leaders ‘mock the real meaning of the Jewish tragedy’, as Isaac Deutscher observed after the 1967 War. What is more, these analogies help to justify even greater brutalisation of the Palestinian people.The sadism of Hamas’s attack has made this Nazification much easier, rekindling collective memories, passed down ...”

“... Yoav Gallant: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly’; President Isaac Herzog: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible’) have not disguised their intentions but provided a precise guide. So have the gleeful selfies taken by Israeli soldiers amid the ruins of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been ...”

“... that makes it impossible to imagine seriously that he could have assumed this kind of power? Isaac Deutscher’s massive and authoritative biography, written during the 1950s and 1960s, however brilliant, was too scholarly, and too much in the Marxist tradition, to give emphasis to such hypothetical questions. But they perhaps explain why Trotsky is ...”

“... Another Bolshevik who ran foul of Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, called him ‘a Genghis Khan’, while Isaac Deutscher described Stalin as ‘primitive, Oriental, but unfailingly shrewd’. ‘Cunning’ and ‘shrewd’ are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians; ‘brutal’ is another, at least since Genghis Khan, with Pol Pot and Mao reinforcing the ...”

“... end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.After the 1967 war, Isaac Deutscher recalled a German phrase, ‘Man kann sich totsiegen’ – ‘you can triumph yourself to death.’ The same is true of Israel’s wars today, and for largely the same reasons. ‘Unless Israel decides to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands ...”

“... mentioned the old story of Berlin acting as an academic gatekeeper, and barring the appointment of Isaac Deutscher to a chair at Sussex University. This denial had the sad effect of forcing Deutscher – who had once given Berlin a highly scornful review in the Observer – to churn out Kremlinology for a living: as a ...”

“... the first battle is over.’ But even victory has its drawbacks. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher warned his one-time friend Ben Gurion: ‘The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase “Mann kann sich totseigen!” — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten ...”

“... as the ‘German exotics’. In fact, only Sebastian Haffner and E.F. Schumacher were German; Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler and Jon Kimche came respectively from Poland, Hungary and Switzerland. Several were Jews; another new recruit, the reporter Cyril Dunn, wrote that Astor had an ‘indestructible respect for the brilliance of the Jewish ...”

“... but never personally unattractive. Steiner gave no reference, but at a guess I turned to Isaac Deutscher’s Prophet Armed. Sure enough, on page 93 I found this: ‘“Hideous”, “dissolute”, “demagogical”, “malicious” and “morally repulsive”, these were the epithets which Trotsky threw at the man who had so recently held out to ...”

“... that home was a ‘for now’ place, the place where your suitcase was; that, to misquote Isaac Deutscher, trees have roots and refugees have legs because they have to keep on fleeing.These realisations arrived gradually, but there was one immediate, definitive change for the Slomnicki family as their ship headed into the pitching, slanting, very ...”

“... anger than sorrow’. In​ a critique of Renouvin’s La Crise européenne, the historian Jules Isaac noted that the placid surface of ‘objective’ historical prose could be deceptive. Might it not be better, he wrote that a work of history not seem too objective, since it never is … I begin to worry when a historical exposition, by its ...”