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“... members had to march in political parades, sign petitions against Yankee imperialism and celebrate Stalin’s birthday. Even within the regime, the Liga was disliked for its dogmatism; as late as the 1970s, when most Polish communists had grown cynical about their future, its grim leaders clung to a ferro-concrete Stalinism. When the system finally fell down ...”

“... through the eyes of a New York journalist and film critic: a process that began with the death of Stalin and ended with the sale of chunks of the Berlin Wall in Bloomingdale’s. Hoberman chronicles these events from the point of view of three related personae: the thoughtful Jewish New Yorker, reading the novels of Victor Serge or reconsidering the Rosenberg ...”

“... in December 1973 he attended another all-night performance, of Robert Wilson’s Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, and met Wilson at the post-performance party as dawn broke over Manhattan. Wilson was not so much a playwright as what has been called a theatre artist: his dramaturgies were mobile strings of words and visual images combined with ...”

“... of freedom. Winstanley might be a 20th-century communist who has learnt nothing from the career of Joseph Stalin. I am not convinced that when contemporaries below the rank of gentry read Winstanley (or Plattes, Chamberlen or Plockhoy, or Chaos) they would find a ‘pessimistic view of the nature of man’ leading to a denial of freedom. Similarly, Dr ...”

“... one can suppose, run foul of that opinionated, jealous and vindictive theorist of language, Joseph Stalin. In this country, whatever future lay open for Saussure early on was blighted by the remarks made about him by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning, where he is dead and buried by page six, charged with having ...”

“... herself on combative terms with his successors, first Robert Gottlieb and then Tina Brown (‘Joseph Stalin in high heels’). She accepted a job as professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, a position she still holds. She got divorced. And she devoted more time to her garden. In the opening essay of My Garden (Book), Kincaid ...”

“... is always a terribly bad sign when people’s birthdays get to be celebrated, whether it be Nero, Joseph Stalin, Nelson Mandela or the Queen. But it is, above all, the Great Lie at the Centre. It demeans and corrupts our culture by commanding the worship of rank, not merit; of inheritance, not achievement. It makes people accept that sheer humbug is ...”

“... was able to employ its talents with relative freedom on behalf of the Revolution. With the rise of Stalin, all artistic endeavour was requisitioned into the service of the state. ‘The one and only task of Soviet literature,’ one influential journal declared, ‘is the depiction of the Five-Year Plan and the class war.’ Conformist mediocrity was the key ...”

“... Geller’s arm and pointed out of the bus at some distant clouds, shouting: ‘Look! There’s Joseph Stalin in the clouds! What is he doing up there?’ He had the bus stop, and ran into the desert. ‘Oh my God, Larry, follow me!’ Elvis was babbling, tears running down his face. He grabbed Geller, hugged him and said: ‘You’re right: you told ...”

“... out an occasional article on ‘The Language and Style of Literary Works in the Light of I.V. Stalin’s Linguistic Studies’) was too heterodox and idiosyncratic a thinker to be handled with impunity in his own country. But when censorship began to ease with Gorbachev, and then collapsed completely, the Russians were free to catch up and work out their ...”

“... Stalin was a ‘grey blur’ in the opinion of Nikolai Sukhanov, the Menshevik-Internationalist chronicler of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky thought him a faceless ‘creature of the bureaucracy’, even in power. These must be among the most misleading descriptions ever to capture the fancy of generations of historians ...”

“... series made around the turn of the 1980s, or the intense political works made after studying with Joseph Beuys at the Academy in Düsseldorf in the 1960s. ‘Zwei wird zu einem’ by Jörg Immendorff (1979). ‘Felt Suit’ by Joseph Beuys (1970) ‘Untitled’ by Jörg Immendorff (1974) ‘Die Geschichte der ...”

“... Gazette, proposed that each of the three ‘streams’ of literature which developed after Stalin’s death – ‘official’, ‘village prose’ and ‘liberal’ – was in terminal crisis: the first two have collapsed into a Russian nationalism made the more bitter for official writers by the loss of prestige, money and subsidised print runs, and ...”

“... had known one another for decades. As they convened in Moscow in February 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, most had little real sense of the new political course on which the party had embarked. Delegates attended long sessions in the Kremlin each day, visited factories and sampled the capital’s cultural life. They heard speeches, many about the ...”

“... 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. Times have ...”