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“... that ‘this Gramscian polarity was given too cultural a turn.’ His ‘national nihilism’, as Isaac Deutscher put it, had got the better of him. In 1987, in ‘Figures of Descent’, which he now reprints together with some of his earlier NLR essays, in English Questions, he offered a more material and pointedly comparative account of what by then ...”

“... played a complaisant part. And, in quite another key, I recall the death at about that time of Isaac Deutscher, who had done so much in the early years of the teach-in movement to remind the young that ‘the end of ideology’ was itself an ideological construct, and that there still existed factors such as class and power. (When he spoke at the main ...”

“... at what was now the CIA. (In a move reminiscent of Isaiah Berlin’s academic blackballing of Isaac Deutscher, Schlesinger would later try to out the historian William Appleman Williams as a communist to the president of the American Historical Association.) The Life article cost Schlesinger many of his friends on the left, but it won him new ...”

“... Communiqués in the Struggle for Truth are devoted to ‘pseudo-history’ as represented by Isaac Deutscher, G.D.H. Cole, D.F. Fleming (on the origins of the Cold War), and the American historian of the Soviet Union, Arch Getty. He polemicised against me too, as a Sovietological ‘revisionist’, though for some reason rather mildly, charging me ...”

“... than the Nazis themselves, Israeli leaders ‘mock the real meaning of the Jewish tragedy’, as Isaac Deutscher observed after the 1967 War. What is more, these analogies help to justify even greater brutalisation of the Palestinian people.The sadism of Hamas’s attack has made this Nazification much easier, rekindling collective memories, passed down ...”

“... Another Bolshevik who ran foul of Stalin, Nikolai Bukharin, called him ‘a Genghis Khan’, while Isaac Deutscher described Stalin as ‘primitive, Oriental, but unfailingly shrewd’. ‘Cunning’ and ‘shrewd’ are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians; ‘brutal’ is another, at least since Genghis Khan, with Pol Pot and Mao reinforcing the ...”

“... that makes it impossible to imagine seriously that he could have assumed this kind of power? Isaac Deutscher’s massive and authoritative biography, written during the 1950s and 1960s, however brilliant, was too scholarly, and too much in the Marxist tradition, to give emphasis to such hypothetical questions. But they perhaps explain why Trotsky is ...”

“... mentioned the old story of Berlin acting as an academic gatekeeper, and barring the appointment of Isaac Deutscher to a chair at Sussex University. This denial had the sad effect of forcing Deutscher – who had once given Berlin a highly scornful review in the Observer – to churn out Kremlinology for a living: as a ...”

“... the first battle is over.’ But even victory has its drawbacks. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher warned his one-time friend Ben Gurion: ‘The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase “Mann kann sich totseigen!” — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten ...”

“... as the ‘German exotics’. In fact, only Sebastian Haffner and E.F. Schumacher were German; Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler and Jon Kimche came respectively from Poland, Hungary and Switzerland. Several were Jews; another new recruit, the reporter Cyril Dunn, wrote that Astor had an ‘indestructible respect for the brilliance of the Jewish ...”

“... but never personally unattractive. Steiner gave no reference, but at a guess I turned to Isaac Deutscher’s Prophet Armed. Sure enough, on page 93 I found this: ‘“Hideous”, “dissolute”, “demagogical”, “malicious” and “morally repulsive”, these were the epithets which Trotsky threw at the man who had so recently held out to ...”

“... that home was a ‘for now’ place, the place where your suitcase was; that, to misquote Isaac Deutscher, trees have roots and refugees have legs because they have to keep on fleeing.These realisations arrived gradually, but there was one immediate, definitive change for the Slomnicki family as their ship headed into the pitching, slanting, very ...”

“... just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function of the old British ...”