“... On travelling to the mining region of the Jiu Valley in Romania earlier this year, I found myself once more facing a difficulty that had become familiar to me in a decade of reporting from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: how to reconcile my sense of shock at the misery and deprivation of the people about whom I was writing with my conviction that few of their demands, which mostly came down to a plea for things to stay as they were, could or even should be granted ...”

“... institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in the same way. Both writers ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”

“... take long for all that to change. In a book full of closely observed incident and character, John Kampfner describes a zadvorkia, or courtyard party, which he happened upon in Central Moscow soon after Yeltsin won the Russian Presidency in June 1991: ‘I had stumbled on the nouveaux riches, the New Russians as they came to be known, at play for the ...”

“... Boris Yeltsin’s survival as President of Russia despite tensions which would long since have destroyed most Western politicians is due in part to the very absence of the constraints that affect politicians in the rich democracies. In his erratic way he has done a great deal to advance democratic behaviour in his country, but Russia is not a democracy and does not judge its leaders by democratic standards – and that helps ...”

“... Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a lens through which we can see the character of contemporary Russians close up and grotesquely exaggerated. The Zhirinovsky glass reveals and enlightens like a Francis Bacon portrait. Even before the elections shot him to prominence, Zhirinovsky was in the habit of issuing threats of an apocalyptic kind – nuclear strikes against Japan and Germany, Russian expansion to the Indian Ocean, the ‘annihilation’ of the Nato armies ...”

“... One way of thinking of the city – any city – according to Charles Jencks, is as ‘an uncanny organism, a slime mould’ that has always refused the marshalling of planners. ‘Inevitably,’ he writes, ‘mechanistic models did not work according to plan: their separation of functions was too coarse and their geometry too crude to aid the fine-grained growth and decline of urban tissue ...”

“... agenda tied to its tail, one which was destructive of social solidarities, while the right-wing John Redwood objected that it came veined with social-democratic notions which discouraged governments like Britain’s from making up their minds to be independent nation states in charge of their own economy and their own politics. The different styles of ...”

“... Why is it so important for the rich states of the world that Russia and the other post-Communist states become capitalist democracies? Why are rich foreign countries so determined to lavish resources, generally perceived as scarce, on a country whose standard of living, though declining, is still much higher than that of most of the Third World? The first reason is fear ...”

“... socialist economy, get anything from Milton Friedman – as you could, say, from Paul Samuelson or John Kenneth Galbraith, two US economists who are well-known in reformist circles and the availability of whose work in translation pre-dates Gorbachev. Does Aganbegyan not understand this? Or is he, in the Soviet way, inscribing his support for Friedman’s ...”

“... who is behind all the bribes’ – which they alleged to be worth many millions of dollars. John Cripton, a Canadian impresario who had booked the Maryinsky/Kirov on foreign tours for ten years, said that Vinogradov used to demand additional payments on every contract. Vinogradov denies everything, and – now out on bail – has continued to work at ...”

“... Grandfather was John Wesley Lloyd, son of the Rev. John Lloyd from Llanidloes; after an education at Kingswood School, entry to which was restricted to the sons of Methodist ministers, he became a dentist and moved to Liverpool. His own son, also John Wesley Lloyd, was ineligible for Kingswood and sent therefore to the Methodist-inspired Leys School in Cambridge as the next best thing; he qualified in medicine but, like his eponymous father, became a Liverpool dentist – chapel-going, teetotal, Liberal ...”

“... alone on the Left in their ability to raise the obvious questions about how the world works. As John Lloyd puts it in his opening chapter: ‘The global movements’ – his term for the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation milieu – ‘have found new ways of exercising political power . . . They can generate widespread public sympathy and a degree ...”

“... John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell article’, in which he criticised ‘a large part of the British Left’ for its opposition to the war in Iraq, described the Statesman as ‘a sort of upmarket version of the Daily Mirror’, and concluded that because ‘the NS believes that Blair and the US are the problem, not the solution,’ it was ‘time to recognise that Blairites like me should not appear regularly in its pages ...”

“... Brown was one of the convenor/editors of the Red Paper for Scotland in the early Seventies, and John Lloyd saw the inside of the Communist Party before helping to found a pro-European Marxist tendency at about the same time. Rather touchingly, he uses the chorus of the ‘Internationale’ to supply the chapter headings of his ‘CounterBlast’, which ...”