Gore Vidal described Singer as "one of the best, and certainly the sanest, interpreters of things European for American readers", with a "Balzacian eye for human detail".

Mike Davis labelled Singer "the left's most brilliant arsonist", with a talent for "set[ting] ablaze whole forests of desiccated cliches".

Esther, a Marxist, interested both Daniel and a young Isaac Deutscher in left-wing politics, and specifically the ideas of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg.

[2] Singer spent the rest of his life living in Paris, reporting first for The Economist, and then after 1970 for The Nation, and became in 1980 the magazine's European correspondent.

He requested that the announcement of his death be accompanied by a quotation from Luxemburg, still his political idol, shortly before her execution: "Your order is built on sand.

Influenced by anarchism, Trotskyism, and various newer dissident schools of Marxism, he was devoted ultimately to the political ideas of Marx and Luxemburg.

[3] While Singer was an opponent of Stalinism, and believed the French Communist Party in large part responsible for De Gaulle's success in taking power in 1958 and his failure to be overthrown in 1968, he had a nuanced view on the question.

He wrote that "while the totalitarian nature of Stalin's Russia is undeniable, I find the thesis of 'totalitarian twins' both wrong and unproductive, and recognised the deep working-class implantation of the CP.

"[6] The Road to Gdansk, published by Monthly Review Press in 1981,[6] is a collection of essays on Poland, the Soviet Union, and Solidarity.

[6] The book dissects the phenomenon of Mitterrand, who came into office as the first socialist president in French history with "the most radical program of any offered in the West by a prospective government in at least thirty years" but by the end of the 1980s had abandoned radicalism and turned the French Socialist Party back into a standard European social democratic party.

Instead, Singer wrote: We are at a moment, to borrow [Walt] Whitman's words, when society "is for a while between things ended and things begun," not because of some symbolic date on a calendar marking the turn of the millennium, but because the old order is a-dying, in so far as it can no longer provide answers corresponding to the social needs of our point of development, though it clings successfully to power, because there is no class, no social force ready to push it off the historical stage.

[11]Barbara Ehrenreich described the book as "magisterial in its historical sweep [and] fiercely democratic in its vision", providing "the thinking person's bridge to the 21st Century".

[1] Deserter from Death: Dispatches from Western Europe 1950–2000, is a posthumous collection of Singer's journalistic writing over the course of his life, published by Nation Books in 2005.