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“... Ickes replied, ‘because you won’t talk frankly, even with people who are loyal to you.’ Joseph Persico, whose admiration for FDR, like that of many Americans, is close to hero-worship, treats FDR’s endless deceptions and tricks with indulgence. John Steinbeck, whom FDR once persuaded to do some spying for him in Mexico, came to the conclusion that ...”

“... for the past twenty years. Like Tengiz Abuladze’s astonishing film Repentance, it focuses on Stalin’s repressions. History is also feeling the effects of glasnost. Over the past nine months, a campaign to de-Stalinise Soviet history has been gaining momentum, and it appears to have won Gorbachev’s support. There should, he recently said, be no ...”

“... some of the discarded oppositionists to rejoin the party. At the Congress of Victors in 1934, when Stalin claimed the success of collectivisation and the triumph of his own faction, Kirov obtained the highest number of votes in the elections to the Central Committee. Mysteriously, he was assassinated in December that year. Bibikov’s turn came in October ...”

“... over the whole show. Before the academic easel painters had time to regroup as Social Realists and Stalin pulled the plug on Modernism, an argumentative cohort of Constructivists and Supremacists had a chance to try their utterly confident, highly theorised, future-directed way of image-making and image-editing on the stage, in film, in posters, books and ...”

“... impressed by him, read up on Marxism and was tempted to join the Trotskyists (‘they always got Stalin and Stalinism completely right’). The trouble was that they were hostile to the Popular Front, which Suret supported as a barrier against fascism. The way he resolved the dilemma was typical. There had been furious communist criticism of Georges ...”

“... included Francisco Miranda, the revolutionary general and former lover of Catherine the Great; Joseph Fouché, one of Louis XVI’s executioners; Boissy d’Anglas, President of the Convention after Thermidor; and Chateaubriand, who like several of the others kept up a warm and friendly relationship with Astolphe after his passion for the boy’s mother ...”

“... Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city ...”

“... other accounts is either a blind spot or is moralistically dismissed. In the standard account, Stalin betrayed the Soviet revolution in the arts by imposing on artists a regime of servile kitsch. After the avant-garde flowering before and after 1917 – Malevich’s and Lissitzky’s Suprematism in painting, Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s collectivist ...”

“... for inklings of totalitarianism, focusing excessive attention on the ‘Hitlerian items’ (in Joseph Schumpeter’s barbed phrase), such as Marx’s proposal to introduce ‘industrial armies, especially for agriculture’. Reacting to this fundamentally novel situation and the interpretative freedom it offers, Eric Hobsbawm urges us to experience the ...”

“... and had done most to defeat his armies in the field. What lay between the two was, of course, Stalin’s hectic ‘modernisation’ of the country, to which Isaac Deutscher, in his famous biography of Stalin, had devoted more than a few ecstatic pages. Carr’s own work concerned the origins of the Stalinist apparatus ...”

“... at Coyoacán, engaged in heated imaginary conversation with old dead Bolsheviks, arguing about Stalin, and how and why they had been defeated by him. Serge noted that Sedova wasn’t looking well:What gnaws at her in reality is an immense bereavement, infinitely greater than that of Lev Davidovich, which only finished her off. It is grief for an era and an ...”

“... who ever came into contact with this ‘polyvalent’ and ‘extraordinarily attractive person’ (Joseph Needham), considered by competent judges to be ‘one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century’ (Linus Pauling). There are two reasons for reading the biography of this brilliant and tragic figure: sheer human curiosity about an individual ...”

“... since the post-war actions of the Soviet Union were predetermined by the personal inclinations of Stalin and the dictates of Communist ideology. All that was in doubt was the capacity and inclination of the West to respond effectively to the threat. Thomas does not endorse the old right-wing attacks on Franklin Roosevelt (attacks newly popular among ...”

“... or even conformist backgrounds.) In spring 1944, Togliatti returned from Moscow, instructed by Stalin to take charge of a divided Party uncertain about its political objectives. This is the starting point of Magri’s ‘possible history of the PCI’, though other historians would pay more attention to the heritage of the Comintern years, which, after ...”

“... crystallographer J.D. Bernal in his 1939 book The Social Function of Science. By then, however, Stalin had dragooned science and scientists in the USSR into following a rigid party line, and in 1946 theory was ossified in the claim by Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee of the CP, that the world was divided into two camps: one Soviet and ...”