Volume 44, Number 15 · October 9, 1997
Why the Cold War Worked
By Tony Judt
We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History Press
by John Lewis Gaddis
A Council on Foreign Relations Book/ Clarendon Press/Oxford University, 425 pp., $30.00
The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949
edited by Giuliano Procacci
Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1,054 pp., L170,000
Postwar London, where I grew up, was a world fueled by coal and driven by steam, where market vendors still used horses, where motor cars were uncommon and supermarkets (and much of what they sell) unknown. In its social geography, its climate and environment, its class relations and political alignments, its industrial trades and its habits of social deference, London in 1950 would have been immediately recognizable to an observer from half a century before. Even the great 'socialist' projects of the postwar Labour governments were really the late flowering of the reforming ideas of Edwardian-era Liberals. Much had changed, of course; in Britain as in the rest of Europe war and economic decline had changed the physical and moral landscape. Yet for just that reason the distant past seemed closer and more familiar than ever. In important ways, mid-twentieth-century London was still a late-nineteenth-century city. Even so, the cold war had long since begun.
Review, 6388 words
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