Cold war

The unforgettable moment a quarter of a century ago when the Berlin Wall came down was the most vivid drama in that dizzying year of revolutions in 1989 when the Soviet empire fell to its knees. But another event a month later and 250 miles away in Prague was equally poignant. As the playwright/philosopher Václav Havel was sworn in as president of Czechoslovakia and declared in one of the most moving speeches I have heard, ‘Citizens, your government has returned to you’, it was clear that if history hadn’t exactly come to an end, the world had changed utterly. In his own country Havel’s reputation has nosedived since those giddy days, though it flickered briefly after his death two years ago.

Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security Service, recruited H.R. Trevor-Roper (as his name would appear the following year on the title page of his first book, his acerbic and somewhat anti-clerical life of Archbishop Laud). He was a young Oxford don, or would-be don, a research fellow of Merton. His academic career was now interrupted for six years: nominally commissioned in the Life Guards, he plunged deep into the murky world of secret intelligence. Before that, and before he turned to Modern History, Trevor-Roper had been a brilliant classicist, winning a string of university prizes.

Vladimir Putin calls it ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century’, a viewpoint which explains much of his recent behaviour. Few others anywhere in the world, particularly people who live around Russia’s borders, would agree that the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything to lament. From Riga to Tbilisi and from Kiev to Tashkent, Christmas Day 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the USSR and the Red Flag was lowered from the Kremlin, remains a day to celebrate. With nearly a quarter of a century’s hindsight it still seems astonishing that a great superpower and, with it, an entirely different way of looking at the world — Soviet-style communism — disappeared almost overnight and with practically no bloodshed.

The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also a reminder that our modern world is in some ways even chillier and less stable than the one it replaced. Once again, the central character is Thomas Kell, the MI6 agent who was trying to claw his way back from unmerited disgrace in Cumming’s previous novel, A Foreign Country. Even now, Kell is still on unpaid leave — which, though tiresome for him, is convenient for Amelia, the current ‘C’. They are old colleagues and, up to a point, friends, and she knows him for what he is: a fine intelligence officer caught between his own demons and the shifting, often ruthless expedients of his job.

No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of respectable ossification; no armistice of opposing historians seems in prospect. It maintains a terrible, vivid, constantly mutable life. Like the French Revolution, its meaning shifts from generation to generation and according to which politician happens to be speaking at the moment. In 1989 Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity to deliver a highly tactless speech to the French on the real origins of political liberty. In recent weeks, Michael Gove, Sir Richard Evans and Tristram Hunt have embroiled themselves in an argument about the significance of the war which showed none of the abstruse nature of most discussions about history.

Ten years ago, a determined historian transformed our picture of John F. Kennedy. Robert Dallek had finally got his hands on the president’s medical records and discovered just how big a part JFK’s constant health problems played in his life. Instead of a young, fit, athletic leader, Dallek revealed a man racked with pain, suffering from Addison’s disease and excruciating spinal damage and swallowing a daily pharmacy of drugs and potions. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, when his finger hovered over the nuclear button, he was pumped full of steroids and antibiotics, amphetamines and testosterone, ritalin and sleeping pills. He had been given the last rites on three occasions before he was 35.

This is a book about the clash of faith and reason over the truth or otherwise of a catastrophic, world-shaping flood — and it doesn’t once mention climate change. The debate here is much less stale. David Montgomery is a prize-winning geology professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and he recounts the history of his discipline from Aristotle to plate tectonics, showing how geological thinking has always been shaped by the great narrative of Noah’s flood. It is a grand tale, and told with verve and excitement. Montgomery also entertainingly surveys the archaeological and literary evidence for ancient Middle Eastern floods — each of which has been acclaimed, in turn, as ‘Noah’s’.

Jeffrey Sachs is the world’s best-connected development economist. An academic with highly developed communication skills, he has always managed to secure access to policy makers and to offer them advice. His record is controversial. Back in the 1990s he worked on Russia’s transition from a command to a capitalist economy. He advocated the approach that Yeltsin adopted — shock therapy. The result was pensioners on the streets selling off furniture, jewellery and even their clothes to raise cash for food. Whilst there were many other factors at play, it now seems obvious that China’s transition to capitalism was better handled. China didn’t take Sachs’s advice.