How a Moscow archivist exposed the KGB, file by file
Gordon Corera’s account of the audacious counter-intelligence operative Vasili Mitrokhin is non-fiction that reads like a spy thriller.
ByCold War
How Russia uses sex to ensnare Western diplomats
Even in our age of high-tech cyber espionage, the oldest tricks can be the most effective.
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Whatever happened to the language of peace?
Pope Francis is the only world leader who seems prepared to denounce war.
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Ripping up the Iron Curtain
How a mass picnic party broke open Hungary’s Austrian border and foreshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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How John le Carré infiltrated Oxford
When the author was a spy the university was his battlefield.
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The last days of Pax Americana
The Second Cold War is underway – can the US prevail?
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Churchill and the quest for greatness
Throughout his career, Britain’s wartime prime minister studied how other leaders – Roosevelt, Attlee, Stalin and Gandhi – exercised power.
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George Kennan, loser
The American foreign policy sage was driven as much by pessimism about the US as antipathy to the Soviet Union.
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Milan Kundera’s sexual revolutions
The misunderstood author cared more about skirt-chasing than power politics.
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In defence of “what if?”
Why counterfactual history is an essential tool for understanding the present.
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Graham Allison: “American politics is driving towards a provocation that China could not avoid”
The academic who coined “Thucydides’s Trap” warns we are sliding into a catastrophic new conflict.
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From Louise Glück to Rachel Aviv: recent books reviewed in short
Also featuring Susan L Shirk on China under Xi Jinping and Ryan Gingeras on the Ottoman Empire.
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Gorbachev’s magnificent failure
The last Soviet leader, who died this week, accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union – but did so by…
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Nato’s “comeback” pivots on America’s troubled politics
Ambitious agreements made at the Madrid summit belie the danger of a second Trump term
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A new age of global war
Europe believed it had banished war for good. But Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shows we must prepare for armed conflict…
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Lawrence Freedman’s Diary: My ban from entering Russia and memories of Cold War encounters with the KGB
I was last on the Kremlin’s most recent list of people to be sanctioned. This suggested I was something of…
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US gun violence is not just a domestic political issue
The failure to take action is a gift to Chinese and Russian propagandists.
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