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“... close of the Fifties, the New Left put on a mass meeting in London, at which the star speaker was Isaac Deutscher and the slogan was ‘Into the Red Sixties’. At the close of the Seventies, there was a much-anticipated rally in Central Hall, Westminster, unironically billed as ‘The Debate of the Decade’, between Tony Benn and the leaders of the ...”

“... Deutscher’s Trotsky was thought by two generations – his own and its successor – to be one of the great works of biography. The first volume emerged in 1954, soon after the death of Stalin. The last appeared in 1963, at a time when the Soviet Union still seemed strong and confident, and when there remained hopes (not only on the left) that reforms leading towards a Soviet version of democratic socialism might one day be resumed ...”

“... Isaac Deutscher​ , later the biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, was in the Warsaw flat of his closest friend, the political journalist Bernard Singer, early in October 1938 when the Wehrmacht’s entry into the Sudetenland was reported on the radio. ‘There were the roaring, beastly voices of the Nazi leaders, the goosestepping and the drum-beating, all as loud, as close as if the whole thing happened on the street outside our windows ...”

“... some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do well to remember that they still have no judicial or other safeguards to ...”

“... part of a manuscript for the 16th volume. It may perhaps be edited by Carr’s friend, Tamara Deutscher, with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus were of very wide interest. The Bolsheviks could ...”

“... for an old man. Carr was, as he acknowledged, ‘extremely lucky in having the help of Tamara Deutscher’ in completing the History. This help also became essential to the work which followed – The Twilight of Comintern 1930-35 – and to the project which remained sadly incomplete when he died in November 1982: a history of the Comintern’s ...”

“... When Isaac Deutscher was writing his great three-volume biography in the 1950s, Leon Trotsky was a name to conjure with. The first volume came out in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death and 14 years after Trotsky’s murder in Mexico by Stalin’s agent. The epic battle between the two antagonists was still fresh in people’s minds; all over the world, small stubborn groups of ‘Trotskyites’ fought the Stalinists in official Communist Parties ...”

“... district of Warsaw. Self-educated, with a smattering of European languages, able – according to Isaac Deutscher, later a comrade – to express himself coherently only in Yiddish, Mendel was in turn a Bundist, an anarchist in Paris before the First World War, a Communist who fought in the Moscow street battles in 1917, a Polish revolutionary opponent ...”

“... it has always been rather too easy for him to mistake myth for reality. His father, the remarkable Isaac Foot, was the very model of the battling West Country Liberal, a man of wide learning who amassed one of the finest private libraries in the country. Born the fifth child of seven, the young Michael grew up among a veritable forest of Foots, all ...”

“... of all and the one discussed long ago by George Steiner in his Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination. Isaac Deutscher, the non-Jewish Jew par excellence, hesitated in calling his Trotsky trilogy The Prophet. There are messianic traditions after all, and there are messianic traditions. Yet surely Irving Howe, currently the very model of New York social ...”

“... to the camp of Soviet sympathisers and a curious friend and ally of convinced Marxists such as Isaac Deutscher. Carr repeatedly drew parallels between the crimes and achievements of the Soviet and the Western systems, pointing to the human costs of Western industrialisation, and the cruelty of Western colonialism. In the end, he was prepared to ...”

“... Left against Europe’, and his extensive quotation of figures opposed to nationalism, like Isaac Deutscher and Rosa Luxemburg, suggests a brief flirtation with the ‘proletarian internationalism’ he would polemicise against in later years. In ‘Culture and Nationalism’ Nairn expressed his ‘awe’ at Scottish International’s efforts to ...”

“... tries to pass himself off as a benign Central European Marxist intellectual, an Ernst Fischer or Isaac Deutscher fallen among Stalinists. Timothy Garton Ash met Wolf while working on The File and felt both the charm and the deep-seated denial. Wolf, he suggests, was the Albert Speer of East Germany, another argument from moral equivalence that Garton ...”

“... of personal agendas and emotional predispositions. Henri Barbusse admired his subject, Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher wanted to cut him down to size. Dmitri Volkogonov wrote in late Soviet disillusionment, and the German historian Jörg Baberowski in contemptuous disgust. When I was writing my study of Stalin and his closest associates, On Stalin’s Team, I ...”

“... The resulting practice of theatrical – no, operatic – dissimulation was best caught by Isaac Deutscher in his study of the Scandinavian social democrat and all-purpose political conjuror and thug Trygve Lie. Yet there are honourable contrasts, such as Willy Brandt. In the whole of Brandt’s memoirs, the name Wilson is mentioned twice and then ...”