Cuban missile crisis

If you reckon you have an understanding of international politics today, you probably haven’t been listening properly. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are making history too fast for most of us to keep up. Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm seeks to make sense of the current geopolitical chaos by drawing parallels between now and the years before 1914. If you don’t find those comparisons reassuring, you aren’t supposed to. The point being stressed is that, unless we are careful, we risk sleepwalking into a Great Power conflict as terrible as, or worse than, the first world war. Westad is a leading Cold War historian from

In our age of cosmetic fantasy, a dramatic love story between two bespectacled art historians sounds implausible. But add in the Montague-Capulet effect of the Iron Curtain, along with a fearless Russian heroine who proved that love can conquer every barrier, and you have an enchanting tale: a completely true one, beautifully written by the art historian and novelist Iain Pears, the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost among many other books. Pears, who had been a pupil of Francis Haskell, began to visit his former tutor’s widow Larissa Salmina on a regular basis after 2000. He soon realised from odd remarks just how extraordinary their lives had been.