“... and disparate assembly of scholars, from Robert Tucker, Ronald Suny and Alexander Rabinowitch to Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest. His reading in secondary sources is broad, and includes s0me Russian and German. It’s a lesser work in every sense than Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which came out first though it deals with a later period. The ...”

“... or strong leader. The gist here is that Russia has resisted change and will always do so; that, as Richard Pipes, the American historian of Russia, argues, Communism was autocracy in a new guise until Gorbachev began to alleviate its worst features and promised to give it a human, democratic face; that Yeltsin, after a brief period of showy democracy and ...”

“... their own author. In aristocratic circles authorship was attributed to one of their own – Sir Richard Vyvyan was a popular candidate at fashionable metropolitan soirées when the sensation was at its height, and the name of Prince Albert was, according to one account, also suggested. In ecclesiastical circles any one of a number of free-thinking radicals ...”

“... were categorised as ‘bourgeois falsifiers’, the most notorious being the American scholar Richard Pipes, known for his anti-Soviet politics (he was later national security adviser on Soviet and East European affairs under Reagan), who got a whole book to himself (Mister Paips falsifitsiruet istoriiu). I was quite critical of American Sovietology ...”

“... comprehension of what, musically speaking, had been going on. He recounted that Decca’s A&R man, Richard Rowe (who was to become twice famous, once for signing the Rolling Stones and once for turning down the Beatles),made a number of journeys to Scotland in the years following 1950 and became impressed with the financial advantages which might accrue from ...”

“... us ‘just about where we were’. An American writer on British intervention in the Civil War, Richard Ullman, managed to offend Carr. He unearthed some minutes, written by Carr as a junior official in the Foreign Office, which spoke quite warmly of the White cause. He used these in footnotes, and Carr’s review responded: it went on and on about how ...”

“... One of the aims of anthropology,’ Richard Rudgley says, ‘is to understand the self by way of the other.’ Are we to take it that if the Koryaks of Siberia had a high old time on the fly-agaric – or on the recycled urine of a fly-agaric consumer – we too should stock up on magic mushrooms? Rudgley maintains that humans have ‘a universal need for liberation from the restrictions of mundane existence, satisfied by experiencing altered states of consciousness ...”

“... of the Ottoman Sultan. The Russians comprised about half of the peoples of the Tsarist Empire. Richard Pipes has argued that Russia became an empire before it was a nation, but the judgment only holds by Western standards. In the Eastern context, Russian national consciousness stands out very early and starkly against the court cultures of Vienna or ...”

“... it just as forcefully. How could he consistently associate himself with Russophobes such as Richard Pipes, who want us to believe that Russians have authoritarianism stitched into their genetic code? Deep contextual insight is ostensibly what leads Cohen to dismiss foreign blueprints and game plans. Russia should develop ‘an indigenous economic ...”

“... amount to a Niagara of ad slots, bought and sold via what participants call the ‘programmatic pipes’: a global digital infrastructure of datacentres, AdTech platforms and fibre-optic cables.To process the torrent flowing through the pipes and assess each and every ad slot – whether it is worth bidding for, and if so ...”

“... novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and nastiness, vanity, callousness, lust for blood, but – like a French Impressionist – utter black is not a colour for him. Cobb is most moving and persuasive when he speaks of women and fugitives. ‘A deserter cannot ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”

“... of Vietnam Syndrome. His ‘theory of the Cold War’ was ‘We win, they lose,’ as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary fringe position in 1964 ...”

“... for money; there was whist, also played for money; or you could drink coffee and smoke the clay pipes kindly provided by the establishment. Unlike their English counterparts, Hamburg’s coffee houses admitted women, so there was female company to be had too. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that many of the foreigners passing through Germany’s ...”

“... hates them all and is anguished with boredom. Then he comes across a reproduction of a portrait of Richard III and likes what he sees. ‘Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist … He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it.’ It’s a lot of romance to read into a medieval ...”