Dominic Sandbrook: If you miss the Cold War, you weren't there
[Dominic Sandbrook is a British historian and writer.]
John le Carré has a new book out in a month's time, and you have to admire the old fox's timing.
It is almost 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the conflict that inspired The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and yet in the last week half-forgotten memories of Brezhnev, Andropov and Mutually Assured Destruction have been flooding back with a vengeance.
Russian tanks rumbling through the mountains of Georgia, Chinese students cheering in eerie unison - did the Cold War really end, or did we just imagine it?
It seems callous to say it after a week that has seen a nasty little war rip the Caucasus apart, but people have been pining for the Cold War for a while.
"God, I miss the Cold War," said Judi Dench's imperious M in the last Bond film. Oddly, that sentiment puts her in exactly the same boat as John Updike's fictional American everyman Rabbit Angstrom, who on his last appearance remarked that "it gave you a reason to get up in the morning."
And talking of fictional American everymen, even George W Bush misses the Cold War. "When I was coming up, with what was a dangerous world, we knew exactly who they were," he opined wistfully a few years ago. "It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them were."
Since the Cold War was above all a citizen's conflict, we all have a war story to tell...
Read entire article at Telegraph
John le Carré has a new book out in a month's time, and you have to admire the old fox's timing.
It is almost 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the conflict that inspired The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and yet in the last week half-forgotten memories of Brezhnev, Andropov and Mutually Assured Destruction have been flooding back with a vengeance.
Russian tanks rumbling through the mountains of Georgia, Chinese students cheering in eerie unison - did the Cold War really end, or did we just imagine it?
It seems callous to say it after a week that has seen a nasty little war rip the Caucasus apart, but people have been pining for the Cold War for a while.
"God, I miss the Cold War," said Judi Dench's imperious M in the last Bond film. Oddly, that sentiment puts her in exactly the same boat as John Updike's fictional American everyman Rabbit Angstrom, who on his last appearance remarked that "it gave you a reason to get up in the morning."
And talking of fictional American everymen, even George W Bush misses the Cold War. "When I was coming up, with what was a dangerous world, we knew exactly who they were," he opined wistfully a few years ago. "It was us versus them, and it was clear who the them were."
Since the Cold War was above all a citizen's conflict, we all have a war story to tell...