The Cruel Peace : Everyday Life and the Cold War

Chronicling the impact of the Cold War from the arenas of global politics to the psychic interior of our private apprehensions and phobias, this book combines renderings of the cockpits of Superpower confrontations in Berlin, Korea, Cuba, Budapest, Prague and Vietnam with the recollections of frontline participants.

Recollections from George Kennan, Lord Carrington, Willy Brandt, Freeman Dyson, Joan Didion and others are included. The author also includes readings of the era's best-known imaginative fictions, which helped make moral sense and nonsense of Cold War ideology and myth - films like "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Dr Stangelove" as well as novels like "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" and "Gorky Park" - to provide a rich understanding of the psychology of political suspicion.

Fred Inglis is the author of "Popular Culture and Political Power".