If you have to go outside, put on gumboots and a scarf. Use your reserves of water very sparingly.
HMSO Civil Defence Handbook No 10 (1963): Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack Elegantly written for the general reader, it is an essential introduction.ģ. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”Īn admirably lucid and comprehensive account of the nuclear-armed stand-off – its origins and causes, its end and what happened in between. It supplied us with a vocabulary we still use and is as relevant today as it was when Orwell wrote it. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains the defining vision of totalitarian rule. Orwell takes his place at the head of this list as the first writer to use the term “cold war” in relation to geopolitical conditions immediately after the second world war (in You and the Atomic Bomb). If there is an account of how the conflict felt to an ordinary citizen of the USSR who believed the official rhetoric, I’d be glad to know. I realise that the list leaves out the Soviet point of view. I have chosen some that seem to me to give a strong sense of what it felt like to be living through the cold war and of the fears that people had. How lucky we are that the world survived the cold war and can afford to let it become history and fictive backdrop.ĭozens of books could have made this list. Mutual misapprehension, fear, mistrust, the near-impossibility of telling reality from illusion – the features of that time make it the perfect setting for a novel that is about espionage but also about isolation and obsessive love. As we now know, that anxiety was justified as late as 1983, the Soviet leadership mistook a routine Nato exercise as cover for imminent nuclear attack. My novel, The Long Room, is set in 1981, a time when it may have seemed that the gravest dangers of the war had already been averted, but which was still pervaded by a constant level of anxiety. That makes it an especially interesting war from the point of view of a writer.
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