Britain's Cold War

Culture, Modernity and the Soviet Threat

Nicholas Barnett

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786723734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The cultural history of the Cold War has been characterized as an explosion of fear and paranoia, based on very little actual intelligence. Both the US and Soviet administrations have since remarked how far off the mark their predictions of the other's strengths and aims were. Yet so much of the cultural output of the period – in television, film, and literature – was concerned with the end of the world. Here, Nicholas Barnett looks at art and design, opinion polls, the Mass Observation movement, popular fiction and newspapers to show how exactly British people felt about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In uncovering new primary source material, Barnett shows exactly how this seeped in to the art, literature, music and design of the period.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Between West and East: Fellow-Travellers and British Culture in the Early Cold War
• 2. ‘No Defence Against the H-bomb’: British Society and H-bomb Consciousness in 1954
• 3. ‘The Iron Curtain is Melting Away’: Encounters with ‘The Thaw’
• 4. ‘When are the British Coming to Help Us?’: British Responses to the Soviet Invasion of Budapest, 1956
• 5. ‘Russia Wins Space Race’: The British Press and the Launch of Sputnik, October 1957
• 6. The Thriller and the Cold War
• 7. Nuclear Anxieties and Popular Culture
• 8. ‘The Greatest Story of Our Lifetime’: The Successes and the Limitations of Soviet Ideology
• 9. Viewing the Soviet Union at the End of Khrushchev’s Rule
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography