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“... in Moscow for four years with the ambassador, William Bullitt. In 1937, Bullitt was replaced by Joseph Davies, and Kennan was sent to head the Russian desk at the State Department’s division for Eastern European affairs in Washington, where he had ample opportunity to observe his own country and brood about its prospects. American society in the late ...”

“... falls into two parts. The first begins in about 1946 and ends in 1948 with the quarrel between Stalin and Tito, and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform. The second carries on through the victory of Mao Zedong and the installation of the Communist regime in Beijing, and concludes with the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Korea ...”

“... firebrand with no money to shovel to the right people. When he made it to the Soviet Union, Stalin stuck him in jail, twice. Depardieu is presentably pre and post-Bolshevik, obstreperous and lovably given to food and drink, the right man for a country like Russia with a flat rate of income tax. And so, on 6 January, at Putin’s invitation, Depardieu ...”

“... Joseph Schumpeter had a refreshing sense of socialism. For him, it had almost no fixed sense at all. ‘A society may be fully and truly socialist and yet be led by an absolute ruler or be organised in the most democratic of all possible ways; it may be aristocratic or proletarian; it may be a theocracy and hierarchic or atheist and indifferent to religion; it may be much more strictly disciplined than men are in a modern army or completely lacking in discipline; it may be ascetic or eudemonist in spirit; energetic or slack; thinking only of the future or the day; warlike and nationalist or peaceful and internationalist; equalitarian or the opposite; it may have the ethics of lords or the ethics of slaves; its art may be subjective or objective; its forms of life individualistic or standardised ...”

“... Stowed in the hold, the corpse of one Royce Traynor seems set to prove that – as Amis says of Stalin in Koba the Dread – ‘he could kill people violently even from his coffin.’ Xan Meo, having subdued the urge to rape his four-year-old daughter, heads off to ‘Fucktown’, USA – the Beverly Hills of porn – to confront ...”

“... horseman in Vienna, the greatest lover in Austria, the greatest economist in the world. This, Joseph Schumpeter used to say, is what he’d set out to be. In one of them, he added, he’d failed. But he never said which. A horse, almost certainly, had let him down. He had a slightly lopsided walk, the result, it was said, of a fall. About women, there is ...”

“... he’ll make himself so ridiculous that it’ll all be over.’ This was not an uncommon view. Joseph Roth, who was also in Berlin at the time, had for years been warning complacent peers against treating Hitler as a clown. He left for Paris that day in January 1933 and reiterated the point in a letter to Stefan Zweig a fortnight later: ‘Quite apart from ...”

“... caused by competing capitalist empires seemed to these bright young men and women self-evident. Stalin’s terror and the Gulag were still far in the future, or unknown in the West. If Sorge had a trade at all, it was, like Philby’s, journalism; the subject that really interested him was politics. In November 1918, he did his best to bring on Germany’s ...”

“... 1920 the Soviet Union’s Caucasus Bureau, under the leadership of the commissar of nationalities, Joseph Stalin, made Nagorno-Karabakh an autonomous Soviet oblast. Initially, it was to become part of Armenia, a reward for its early support of Bolshevism. But after an Armenian nationalist uprising the Soviets reversed the decision, and in 1923 ...”

“... to The Quest for Stability, asks the basic question whether at the end of the Second World War Stalin actually aspired to global hegemony. This, he says, ‘we shall be able to tell only when the Soviet archives have been explored, if indeed then.’ In the same volume Vojtech Mastny, a Russian now teaching in Bologna, argues that ‘initially the Pax ...”

“... drily describes the efforts of Ernest Bevin to get him and his family repatriated, ‘now that Stalin has re-established independent Poland’.) Perhaps, on balance, it really was a more decent age than the present. I remember a Glasgow immigration official telling me, just turned 16 and half-way through the hermetic world of Winchester, ‘to register ...”

“... out to be McCarthy’s last crusade; in a formal and spectacular sense, his career ended when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been ...”

“... already ‘concentrating’ Spanish Republican refugees in camps early in 1939. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the onset of the Phoney War in the autumn, they were among many thousands of German-speaking non-nationals detained by the authorities. Hans was in central France at a camp in Vernuche; Lisa was near the Pyrenees in a ‘women’s camp’ in ...”

“... by Attlee as a failure, but rehabilitated now as the most significant holder of the office since Joseph Chamberlain. The comparison is apt, for, like Chamberlain, Creech-Jones discovered Africa. When the British abandoned India in 1947 they transferred their ambitions to the Dark Continent, where the philanthropist could do good, and the skilled working man ...”

“... an interviewer that the literary situation in the Soviet Union was worse than ever. ‘If under Stalin talented writers were at first published, subsequently vilified in the press, and finally executed or destroyed in camps,’ he said, ‘it’s now the case that no one is executed, almost no one is put in prison – and no one is published.’ He spoke ...”