“... the Order of Lenin at the end of the year. ‘What attracted so many people to Brezhnev,’ wrote Roy Medvedev, later a dissident who had no reason to like him, ‘was his softness, the lack of the usual hardness and cruelty associated with party bosses of the time, a kindness that sometimes also came at the expense of business.’ He detested the old ...”

“... given great prominence in Inglis’s text. They are printed, apparently, verbatim (though Stephen Heath, Lisa Jardine and others have protested they are garbled), and are treated as though they were primary sources. Yet the quotations are oddly at variance with the interpretation they are supposed to support, and seem often to serve as tokens of authenticity ...”

“... this picture is strangely lopsided. A movement that counted revolutionaries like Serge or Trotsky, Roy or Mariategui, Sneevliet or Sorge, not for romantics? For that matter what of Mao, for better or worse a somewhat larger figure in the history of Communism than any of the loyal European functionaries or militants to whom we are introduced ...”

“... rocket motors were testfired at Spadeadam in Cumbria; polite MOD policemen would step out of the heath and turn you back if you tried to motor towards the installation on days when the ground was shaking. Smaller engines filled the air with the sound of ripping linen, titanically magnified, at a converted gun emplacement on the coast of the Isle of ...”