Simon Heffer
Messy Break-Ups
Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World – 1945–65
By Michael Burleigh
Macmillan 588pp £25 order from our bookshop
The twenty years after the end of the Second World War were in their way as terrifying as the conflict itself. They contained a comparable threat to the world order: the defeat of fascism was followed by the ascendancy of communism. The period also saw the shift of global power away from Europe, where it had historically resided, towards America. By the 1960s the Americans had established a hegemony rivalled only by the Soviet Union – which was still a fair way behind. The great prewar power, Britain, was bankrupt but only gradually understanding its impotence. Within a few months of the Second World War ending, the Cold War had begun. America’s monopoly on the nuclear deterrent lasted only briefly, as spies gave the Soviets the necessary secrets to make their own bomb by 1949. With the nations of Europe determined not to go to war with each other again, the new superpower and its enemy sought instead to fight by
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf