[1] Service spent his undergraduate years at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied Russian and classical Greek.

[2] Patenaude, reviewing Service's book alongside a rebuttal by the Trotskyist David North (In Defence of Leon Trotsky), charged Service with making dozens of factual errors, misrepresenting evidence, and "fail[ing] to examine in a serious way Trotsky's political ideas".

The book was criticised by the German historian of communism Hermann Weber, who led a campaign to prevent Suhrkamp Verlag from publishing it in Germany.

The letter cited "a host of factual errors", the "repugnant connotations" of the passages in which Service deals with Trotsky's Jewish origins, implicitly accusing him of anti-Semitism, and Service's recourse to "formulas associated with Stalinist propaganda" for the purpose of discrediting Trotsky.

[4][3] Suhrkamp announced in February 2012 that it would publish a German translation of Robert Service's Trotsky in July 2012.