Armageddon averted

From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Hungarian and Prague uprisings, the fall of the Berlin wall — but the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the great divide between the broadly capitalist West and the broadly socialist East and the numerous proxy conflicts it spawned, were the background to daily life. In retrospect, it seems stable, almost cosy: you knew where you were.

Its ramifications were so many and so all-encompassing that virtually everything you say about it will be true of some part, somewhere. Odd Arne Westad, a Norwegian who is a Harvard professor and co-editor of the magisterial Cambridge History of the Cold War, was brought up on one of the front lines of the confrontation, a region that could have become very hot very quickly. It is in his blood, as it were, and his attempt to summarise the period in 600-plus pages is both comprehensive and concise.