British Fiction and the Cold War

British Fiction and the Cold War
Author: A. Hammond
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-09-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137274859

This book offers a unique analysis of the wide-ranging responses of British novelists to the East-West conflict. Hammond analyses the treatment of such geopolitical currents as communism, nuclearism, clandestinity, decolonisation and US superpowerdom, and explores the literary forms which writers developed to capture the complexities of the age.

Our Game

Our Game
Author: John le Carré
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2016-01-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0241243645

Le Carré's post-Cold War masterpiece, filled with suspense, betrayal, desire and drama The Cold War is over and retired secret servant Tim Cranmer has been put out to pasture, spending his days making wine on his Somerset estate. But then he discovers that his former double agent Larry - dreamer, dissolute, philanderer and disloyal friend - has vanished, along with Tim's mistress. As their trail takes him to the lawless wilds of Russia and the North Caucasus, he is forced to question everything he stood for.

British Cinema and the Cold War

British Cinema and the Cold War
Author: Tony Shaw
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

"Shaw analyses key films of the period, including High Treason, which put a British McCarthyism on celluloid; the fascinatingly ambiguous science fiction thriller The Quatermass Experiment; the court-room drama based on the trial of Hungary's Cardinal Mindszenty, The Prisoner; the dystopic The Damned, made by one of Hollywood's blacklisted directors, Joseph Losey; and the CIA-funded, animated version of George Orwell's classic novel Animal Farm. The result is a deeply probing study of how Cold War issues were refracted through British films, compared with their imported American and East European counterparts, and how the British public received this 'war propaganda'."--BOOK JACKET.

The Cold War

The Cold War
Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2006-12-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440684502

“Outstanding . . . The most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written.” —The Boston Globe “Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject.” —The New York Times The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own. Gaddis is also the author of On Grand Strategy.

British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire
Author: Sam Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2015-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317678958

Drawing focus on a crucial period of contemporary British history, this book explores Cold War anxieties over Imperial decline and British identity through analysis of space in popular twentieth-century spy fiction, enabling the cultural impact of decolonisation to be read in a new and revealing light. Visiting the literary representation of space, identity, and power in the work of Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, it is an excellent resource for any scholars with an interest in spy fiction, British fiction, and popular literature.

Cold Warriors

Cold Warriors
Author: Duncan White
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062449826

In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield. In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.

The Spy and the Traitor

The Spy and the Traitor
Author: Ben Macintyre
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101904208

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

Threatened Masculinity from British Fiction to Cold War German Cinema

Threatened Masculinity from British Fiction to Cold War German Cinema
Author: Joseph Willis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000011976

The impact of the Cold War on German male identities can be seen in the nation’s cinematic search for a masculine paradigm that rejected the fate-centered value system of its National- Socialist past while also recognizing that German males once again had become victims of fate and fatalism, but now within the value system of the Soviet and American hegemonies that determined the fate of Cold War Germany and Central Europe. This monograph is the first to demonstrate that this Cold War cinematic search sought out a meaningful masculine paradigm through film adaptations of late-Victorian and Edwardian male writers who likewise sought a means of self-determination within a hegemonic structure that often left few opportunities for personal agency. In contrast to the scholarly practice of exploring categories of modern masculinity such as Victorian imperialist manliness or German Cold-War male identity as distinct from each other, this monograph offers an important, comparative corrective that brings forward an extremely influential century-long trajectory of threatened masculinity. For German Cold-War masculinity, lessons were to be learned from history—namely, from late-Victorian and Edwardian models of manliness. Cold War Germans, like the Victorians before them, had to confront the unknowns of a new world without fear or hesitation. In a Cold-War mentality where nuclear technology and geographic distance had trumped face-to-face confrontation between East and West, Cold-War German masculinity sought alternatives to the insanity of mutual nuclear destruction by choosing not just to confront threats, but to resolve threats directly through personal agency and self-determination.

Cold War Literature

Cold War Literature
Author: Andrew Hammond
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2006-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134272545

The Cold War was the longest conflict in a century defined by the scale and brutality of its conflicts. In the battle between the democratic West and the communist East there was barely a year in which the West was not organising, fighting or financing some foreign war. It was an engagement that resulted – in Korea, Guatemala, Nicaragua and elsewhere – in some twenty million dead. This collection of essays analyses the literary response to the coups, insurgencies and invasions that took place around the globe, and explores the various thematic and stylistic trends that Cold War hostilities engendered in world writing. Drawing together scholars of various cultural backgrounds, the volume focuses upon such themes as representation, nationalism, political resistance, globalisation and ideological scepticism. Eschewing the typical focus in Cold War scholarship on Western authors and genres, there is an emphasis on the literary voices that emerged from what are often considered the ‘peripheral’ regions of Cold War geo-politics. Ranging in focus from American postmodernism to Vietnamese poetry, from Cuban autobiography to Maoist theatre, and from African fiction to Soviet propaganda, this book will be of real interest to all those working in twentieth-century literary studies, cultural studies, history and politics.

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook
Author: Celia Rees
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062938029

"A perfect summer read; gripping, original, well-drawn and compassionate"--Joanne Harris "Celia Rees is a superb writer, and this novel has one of the most irresistible and unique story hooks I've ever come across. This book deserves to be huge!"--Sophie Hannah A striking historical novel about an ordinary young British woman sent to uncover a network of spies and war criminals in post-war Germany that will appeal to fans of The Huntress and Transcription. World War II has just ended, and Britain has established the Control Commission for Germany, which oversees their zone of occupation. The Control Commission hires British civilians to work in Germany, rebuild the shattered nation and prosecute war crimes. Somewhat aimless, bored with her job as a provincial schoolteacher, and unwilling to live with her overbearing mother any longer, thirtysomething Edith Graham applies for a job with the Commission—but she is also recruited by her cousin, Leo, who is in the Secret Service. To them, Edith is perfect spy material...single, ordinary-looking, with a college degree in German. Cousin Leo went to Oxford with one of their most hunted war criminals, Count Kurt von Stavenow, who Edith remembers all too well from before the war. He wants her to find him. Intrigued by the challenge, Edith heads to Germany armed with a convincing cover story: she's an unassuming Education Officer sent to help resurrect German schools. To send information back to her Secret Service handlers in London, Edith has crafted the perfect alter ego, cookbook author Stella Snelling, who writes a popular magazine cookery column. She embeds crucial intelligence within the recipes she collects. But occupied Germany is awash with other spies, collaborators, and opportunists, and as she's pulled into their world, Edith soon discovers that no one is what they seem to be. The closer she gets to uncovering von Stavenow's whereabouts--and the network of German civilians who still support him--the greater the danger. With a unique, compelling premise, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is a beautifully crafted and gripping novel about daring, betrayal, and female friendship.