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“... have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied. So one must travel to California to read, for example, Amis’s several unpublished novels: the ...”

“... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It ...”

“... they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, ‘is intended to be didactic as well as representative.’ Though the things anthologies make happen may be confined to ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from ...”

“... of Animal Farm have been published. That is probably not quite up to date. In a Soviet Union where Robert Conquest was fêted on a recent visit, and his The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow are being serialised, there is not likely to be any flinching at Orwell. The Orwell industry, then, shows no sign of decline, in part because of his political ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some ...”

“... Betjeman. Larkin, of course, is the one contemporary to whom Amis is prepared to yield high marks (Robert Conquest, perhaps the most ‘all right’ of Kingsley’s literary cronies, is shunted off into ‘light verse’). Larkin is named as Amis’s second-favourite poet (Housman is tops, though he may not have stayed tops, we suspect, if Amis had ever ...”

“... a naive sell-out that legitimised Soviet rule without getting anything of value in return. As Robert Conquest put it, ‘the road to Helsinki is paved with good intentions.’ Morgan calls the notion of an exchange of Eastern borders for Western values a ‘myth’: ‘On every significant point, the West prevailed.’ This is putting it too ...”

“... The estimates for the end of the Thirties ranged from Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s ten million and Robert Conquest’s nine million (the latter figure excluded ‘criminals’) to Wheatcroft’s maximum of four to five million, Jasny’s three and a half million and Timasheff’s two million. Elaborate records in the NKVD archives reveal that about two ...”

“... and Stalin, Snyder argues, began by trying to implement unrealisable visions: respectively, the conquest of the Soviet Union and the creation of a German-occupied ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe; and the rapid collectivisation of agriculture, mainly in the Ukraine, in order to feed an urban population created by a headlong rush into industrial ...”

“... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that ...”

“... of how the people with power in his new state might wield it. As we now know, they became what Robert Conquest, in his introduction to Djilas’s book, calls the ‘priviligentsia’. The ‘inspectorate’ – the KGB – defended them, instead of policing them. In a double-take at the end of the book, Julian West wakes up in old Boston. The ...”

“... was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as a later ...”

“... achievement, which unites readers as widely different in their views as the present reviewer and Robert Conquest. Few historians have the courage to attack great subjects, fewer have the grasp to succeed. This is a book which lets the reader look into the face of one of the major social upheavals of history, as terrible and awe-inspiring as the natural ...”

“... the potential enemy’s economic strength were based on the sort of calculation that writers like Robert Conquest have long criticised. According to a memorandum submitted by the Economic Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in April 1946, for instance, Soviet industrial output would exceed that of the rest of Europe by 1960 and overtake that of ...”