the Cold War

When will Ronald Reagan get the recognition he deserves?

14 December 2024 9:00 am

Max Boot’s contention that Reagan was a lightweight pragmatist who played little part in reviving America or winning the Cold War is absurdly revisionist

You didn’t mess with them – the doughty matriarchs of the intelligence world

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Claire Hubbard-Hall pays tribute to the legions of women who devoted their lives to the British secret service but whose efforts went largely unacknowledged

Is now the most exciting point in human history?

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Since today’s computers can process information beyond human capabilities, we are on a precipice never faced before, says Yuval Noah Harari, in another sweeping narrative

Nothing was off-limits for ‘the usual gang of idiots’ at Mad

21 September 2024 9:00 am

First published in 1952, the satirical magazine helped free the American youth of Vietnam War era of some of the stupidest beliefs they were supposed to hold about their country

Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era

29 June 2024 9:00 am

Influenced by Kipling’s Kim, early CIA officers combined a love of overseas adventure with a whiff of imperial paranoia, says Hugh Wilford

Keeping a mistress was essential to John le Carré’s success

14 October 2023 9:00 am

The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’

Violence overshadowed my Yorkshire childhood

29 July 2023 9:00 am

Catherine Taylor describes her anxiety growing up in Sheffield against an ‘uneasy backdrop’ of picketing miners, the Hillsborough disaster and a serial killer on the loose

Behind the Five Eyes intelligence alliance

30 July 2022 9:00 am

In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…

People of little interest: MI5’s view of left-wing intellectuals

25 June 2022 9:00 am

If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they…

Berliners were punished twice – by Hitler and by the Allies

18 June 2022 9:00 am

‘Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.’ Albert Einstein’s deft avoidance of the question put to…

New tactics are needed for the wars of the future

30 October 2021 9:00 am

The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies…

Germany’s post-war recovery was no economic miracle

17 July 2021 9:00 am

Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no…

Berlin in ruins, 1945

Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?

29 September 2018 9:00 am

When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…

Richard Nixon in September 1968

His dark materials

14 October 2017 9:00 am

In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of…

A blast from the past

9 September 2017 9:00 am

If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…

How capitalism really works

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Deirdre McCloskey has been at work for many years on a huge project: to explain why the world has become…

Sins of the past haunt the latest crime fiction

9 January 2016 9:00 am

It’s often the case that present-day crimes have their roots in the past. Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild…

Gorbachev and Reagan sign the historic treaty on 8 December 1987 eliminating Soviet and Us intermediate-range and short-range nuclear missiles

The four men who averted the Apocalypse

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Robert Service’s account of the greatest turning point in modern history is unlikely to be bettered, says Sherard Cowper-Coles

Dusty Springfield at the Royal Variety Performance in 1965 (Getty).

Everything you always wanted to know about Sixties pop —and more

28 November 2015 9:00 am

It might seem an odd choice, but after reading Jon Savage’s new book, I think if I had a time…

Elect of God, Conquering Lion of Judah and King of Kings, c.1930

The King of Kings and I: Haile Selassie, by his great nephew

29 October 2015 9:00 am

Great men rarely come smaller than Haile Selassie. In photographs, the golden crowns, pith helmets and grey felt homburgs he…

Bond would be bored in today’s MI6, says Malcolm Rifkind

6 June 2015 9:00 am

Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot…

Leonid Yakobson in Leningrad c. 1926

Leonid Yakobson: the greatest ballet genius you’ve never heard of

28 March 2015 9:00 am

On YouTube there’s a brief dance video of a Viennese waltz so enchanting that not even Fred and Ginger in…

What went so wrong for Vaclav Havel?

8 November 2014 9:00 am

The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama…

Hugh Trevor-Roper: the spy as historian, the historian as spy

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security…

A Colder War, by Charles Cumming - review

31 May 2014 9:00 am

The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also…