 Welcome everyone, so I'm sorry for the delay as we looked in our pockets for a device that was actually in the bag that was supposed to be in the entire time. I want to thank everyone so much for coming out. It was a beautiful day. I so much appreciate your being here. I'm Anna Litney, Assistant Director of Libraries here at the Robbins Library, and I am very excited to host today's program. A conversation with Duncan White about his book, Cold Warriors, Writers Who Wage the Literary Cold War. I get a lot of proposals from members of the community. All people call me all the time. I'd like to present on my book. I'd like to show my art show, all kinds of stuff that people would like to show at the library. And I think very carefully before I say yes, because I get so many pitches. The reason, when Duncan first contacted me and said he'd like to present about his book here at the library, I said, okay, well, let me do a little research. And a note for all of you writers, make sure your publisher is as good as his. The thing that convinced me to invite Duncan to present here was the piece from his publisher about the book. Cold Warriors is a welcome reminder that in a moment when ignorance is celebrated and reading, seen as a crisply irrelevant, writers and books can change the world. There's so much what we try to do here at the library. We try to offer for the public books and ideas that can help change the world. I'm so excited to hear this presentation. The other thing that we do here at the library is connect the community. And it's always a special joy when we can invite somebody to present here at the library who is a member of our community. Duncan White is an award-winning academic and journalist and the assistant director of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, London, and Oxford and was previously taught at Worldly College. He has lived in Ireland with his family since 2012. We invited him today to join us for the conversation with James Belan of ACMI, our community partner, and another organization in town that has a deep invested interest in showing our Lintonians what our Lintonians are doing and the chance to learn more about Duncan's book and to hear that conversation with James is truly a treat for us all. As ACMI's communication manager, James oversees all communications between ACMI and the Irish community. He also hosts a number of talk show theories produced by ACMI's public affairs department. We're excited to hear from both of them. As you may have noticed, we are filming this event. People who will not be seeing really the camera is only catching our two conversationalists today. So if anyone's getting worried, you will not appear in the video of today's event. But it will be available at ACMI later. I want to thank everyone for coming today and welcome our two speakers. Oh, we are having a few technical difficulties over there. Thanks very much, Anna. I really appreciate it. And one of the reasons that I was so keen to present here was that actually in the early stages of writing this book, I was I left Wellesley and I was looking for work and I was thinking about all sorts of different options. And I decided to try and pitch to write a book that I've been thinking about writing for a little while. And a lot of that was written here at the Robbins Library using the books that were available in the stacks here. And so I've always felt a very sort of strong connection to Robbins. And I sort of feel very strongly that we're very privileged to have such a great library system in Arlington in the Greater Boston area. And we shouldn't really take that sort of thing for granted. It's an honour to be here. Thank you, Anna, so much for your help in setting it up. I'm joined by Khrushchev and the three budgies. We'll try and go through some of these pictures. I'm going to start by just looking through some of the photographs, some of these are in the book itself, to give you a sense of what the book is about, and to give you a sense of the kind of stories I'm trying to tell. This book, I'm an academic, but this book wasn't written for other scholars. This book was written with the sort of general reader in mind. I want to make this history feel kind of compelling to people who are interested in the history, are interested in the history of literature, who may have read Orwell and Green and McCarthy, or Solzhenitsyn and wanted to explore a little more. So the Cold War, I mean, as a child of the 1980s, I sort of got the tail end of the Cold War. To me, it was always, when I thought the Cold War, it was always about nuclear weapons, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin war, all these kind of seismic geopolitical events, and literature didn't really seem to play much of a part in that. Literature was the thing that I studied, the thing that I was passionate about, and it was only as I began to read more, began to read more about the history of the period that I discovered that it wasn't just about Gorbachev and Reagan, but actually the Cold War had been a cultural Cold War, that there had been a battle of ideas waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain between the sort of the Western democratic capitalist ideology on one side and on the other the ideas of communism, more broadly speaking socialism. And the stakes of that battle were pretty high. They were about deciding how we should organise our societies. So we'll try and dodge the budgets. Here, this was the sort of image that I associated with the Cold War growing up. This is a different kind of weapon. This is a series of weather balloons that were released in West Germany containing a precious cargo. That cargo was copies of Animal Barn by George Orwell, translated into Polish. And the idea was, and this is the mid-50s, that the CIA, who were funding this operation, would float these copies of this famous novel into Warsaw-packed territory and that the readers of this book would have their worldview shaken and changed and Polish farmers would maybe rise up against the Communist Party. I mean, it's a naive and perhaps idealistic way of thinking about things, but it showed quite how seriously the CIA and by extension the State Department also the governments in the UK, France, Germany took the idea of culture and literature in particular as a weapon in the Cold War. And that was partly because of what had happened in the 1930s. The rise of national socialism, Nazi party and the way that that ideology had expressed itself in the destruction of books, book burnings in the public square, had really been something that shaken ideals of what capitalism could do. The Great Depression had obviously played a large role in all of this. But by the same token, so on the right you had this kind of attack on literature and then on the left you heard the rise of Stalinism, so the Russian Revolution had happened in 1917 and then Stalin had come to power after a power struggle and he had started to impose very strict rules about what kind of books could be made and what kind of books could be read. These two guys with some impressive facial hair on the right, that's Maxine Gorky, he was a much famous Russian writer in the first half of the 20th century and Ashtonov who was a kind of very sinister and scary Kremlin apparatchik. And between the two of them at the 1934 Soviet Writers Conference, this huge gathering of writers, basically a set of rules were established about what could and couldn't be published and what could be published was stuff that basically was aligned with what the state wanted, with what was good for communism. Fewer than 50% of the writers that attended survived till the next one 10 years later because they were so quickly published. One of them whose story I'll tell in the book is Isaac Barber, a writer who is perhaps unjustly neglected because he really is one of the great writers of the 20th century but he was executed in the basement of the Lvivianka prison in Moscow. Not because he wrote really sort of writing the Hiscentes but because he refused to align himself with the ideas of what a writer should be. It was a way, it was a kind of total control that Stalin saw. So this is Stalin here with his kind of closest political allies including Molotov and then the guy on the left there is the Hedgehog, as he was known. Stalin's Iron Fist, who was responsible for much of the fun, is including the death of Barber. There's the same photo when he himself got perched a few years later. So there was this idea that you were being erased from history because there was only one kind of school read to tell and literature played a big role in telling that school read. Meanwhile, so while this kind of purging is going on in the Soviet Union in the 30s and while the Nazis are burning books and imprisoning writers, German writers going into exile, especially German Jewish writers, a war is happening in Spain that is also going to define a lot of people's politics and define a lot of the ideas that went into the Cold War. There was the Spanish Civil War, again there was rising fascism and it was a war that really captured people's imaginations. Actually, probably not until Vietnam when there was another war that really kind of seized the imaginations of a whole generation of writers. Another one out there to fight, including George Orwell, who once the bloodshed disappeared, you'll see his head poking up at the back there, much taller than all the other, frankly, most teenagers who he was volunteering to fight alongside. These guys went out to fight fascism in a kind of quite idealistic way and a lot of them saw frontline action. Orwell was shot up in the neck himself, was lucky to survive, which is one of the stories I tell in the book. There's Orwell, there's Stephen Spandem, another writer who went out to fight in Spain. What they saw there actually was not just Francoist totalitarianism, they also came face to face with Stalinism and with Stalin's attempt to sort of control what was going on by proxy using his intelligence agents and the Spanish Communist Party to try and gain control. Orwell particularly was horrified by this and went on to write his famous books that kind of attacked totalitarianism and from all kinds of collectives. And in the Second World War, which was a kind of development of this kind of fight with fascism in Spain and Nazi ration, the idea of books and literature became a really important part of the American and British allies' propaganda strategy. They wanted to attack the fact that the Nazis were waging this war on culture and this kind of powerful idea that, you know, you start burning books, eventually you'll start burning people, which was something that obviously was prephetically true and tragically so. A lot of racist way out in the Second World War, that's Ernest Hemingway, and there was a real sense of, with American triumph, a new way of thinking about the United States in the world. Hemingway was symbolic of the kind of confidence beyond cosmopolitan Americans that had gone out before in the Second World War, a little excessively in his case, and resulted in this kind of new idea about what American culture could be. You know, a lot of the rest of the world thought American culture was being to do with things like the mouse and Coca-Cola and Hollywood. And with this new American century dawning, there was a real sense that the U.S. needed to project a more sophisticated image of what its culture was and one that was actually more reflective of the great American writers and the richness of American culture from abstract expressionism to William Portman. So kind of incredibly, the CIA got involved in promoting all this stuff. They kept it secret that their involvement, that the involvement of the CIA was there and that the money came from the State Department of Intelligence Services. But things like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that's Arthur Kustler, who's an outspoken leader of the movement, became these huge networks of writers, publishers, and they attended, they hosted conferences, they subsidised publishing houses in over 180 countries around the world, and it was a real kind of cultural onslaught. And to try and persuade people that democratic capitalism was the way forward, to resist communism in the aftermath of the Second World War. Meanwhile, in Russia, of course, writers like Akhmatova and Kastanak were being continued to be persecuted and silenced, and that actually became part of the conflict. Western forces seeking to promote works like Dr. Djivago, the CIA published special editions of Dr. Djivago when it came out, really because it was banned in the Soviet Union. And so it's the Cold War deepening crisis, this is the Berlin Wall going up, Cuban missile crisis, both happening in the early 1960s. You start to get people who took the Cold War as a subject itself, like Graham Greene and Jean Le Carré, a new genre of kind of Cold War spy fiction sprang up. It was far more cynical about the way that the sort of, the secretive aspects of the Cold War were being waged, in Cuba, in Berlin, and then ultimately in Vietnam. Vietnam, like I mentioned before, is a kind of interesting sequel to the Spanish Civil War in that writers like Mary McCarthy went out to challenge the kind of the the accounts that were being given by the state, about what was going on. A lot of them had been actually involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom and all these kind of CIA organizations, and when that came out, at the same time as the Vietnam War intensified, a lot of them sought to kind of find a way to regain their honor, if anything, by reporting on the truth of what's happening in Vietnam. And then finally, you get the unraveling of the Cold War, where dissidents, writers who kind of stood up to the like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vassalab Harvel defied the powers that be in the intelligence services that were trying to intimidate them, the KGB, to become real leaders, and in Harvel's case, the head of state in being the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, so that writers themselves became this focal point of the kind of percent because they'd been suppressed for so long, and that actually led to the collapse of communism and eventually the fall of the Revolution. Okay, that's a very quick run through of what is an embarrassingly long book. And if any of those images raise questions, I can't speak to those three, but I need to speak to the rest of it. I'll be happy to talk to you more. And I already introduced me. My name's Milan, and I do work at ACMI, which is your local cable television station. Hopefully most of you know that. For those of you who may know people who will be very interested in the subject matter here but are out enjoying the day or out of town or something like that, it will be important to remember that this is being recorded, and we will be showing it on ACMI in the coming weeks and months for you to revisit it if you'd like or for others who'd be interested. You can find out what's on our channels either through the advocate if you happen to get that. We have our schedule in there every week, or you can go to our website, ACMI.tv, and just go on demand there, and you'll be able to find this conversation. So without further ado, let's get into the conversation. I did want to say that many of the lines of inquiry that I'm going to pursue are going to be more general than asking about specific writers, and that's for two reasons. One, I figure as you're answering the questions that I have, you're going to be referencing those writers and some of the great stories that you tell in the book. And then secondly, we are going to have a period of question and answer from the audience to close out the event today, and I'll bet that you guys also will have some questions about specific writers, and so I feel like that will likely be covered. One of the people reviewing your book acknowledged, as you kind of alluded to in your introduction, that there are... The Cold War was waged on a lot of different fronts, right? Geopolitical, ideological, religious even, and you chose, and military of course, but you chose literature, and I'd like to start off by asking why that choice? I mean, it's a good question. I mean, partly, there's two ways of looking at it. There's one that comes from my interests and my background, which is in literary studies, and thinking about why literature is kind of important in the world. We're in a sort of situation in which the study of the humanities is in crisis in universities. We've got declining enrollments at higher education institutions, and you could argue a concomitant decline in critical thinking around the world, which is reflected in perhaps some of our contemporary politics and some of the challenges that we face in educating young people about being able to read closely the things that are presented to them. So I wanted to write a book that really showed how important literature could be, and the Cold War was a period when literature, for whatever you may think of it, was taken incredibly seriously by the powers that be, by the CIA and the KGB, by the Kremlin and the White House. So I wanted to sort of ask why? It seemed very strange that they should invest so much power in novels and stories. And the more I dug into it, the more I kind of discovered that literature had not only been sort of influential, but had been really actually weaponized in these kind of really instrumental ways. And I thought that was a really fascinating story to tell, especially to a generation to think of warfare in the context of drones and cyber attacks and these sorts of things. This was kind of a fascinating story to tell, I thought. Yeah, and I do want to return to that in a few minutes. Before that, though, I noticed that you structured the book first chronologically, but also with a decision clearly to focus on a kind of narrative history form. I'm telling a lot of writers' specific, if not entire biographies, then partial biographies, and certainly their specific stories. So I'm wondering, again, why you would have chosen that particular approach to tackling this very kind of sprawling history and what you found in so doing. So is it real headache? Because it was kind of like trying to cast a movie, right? You've got all these writers and you've got this story you want to tell, and initially I wanted to tell the story thematically, but when I first started working with my editor at Little Brown actually in the UK, he said that, you know, that's going to be really hard for people to follow. You're going to be jumping back and forward in history and you can't really assume people know all this stuff. You need to tell the story. And so we came up with this idea of a group biography, and hopefully if you picked the right writers, you would be able to sort of weave through history and tell all the stories of the different events that happened. And that kind of was quite easy in one sense in that you think, oh, well, George Orwell, you know, he's right at the heart of this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he makes a lot of sense. But then it was, you know, how do I tell the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis? How do I tell the story of the Berlin Wall? And so it was about trying to find the writers whose biographies could do that. Because I really thought in telling this history, I wanted to make it personal. I wanted to show how the writers were engaged in kind of dangerous lives, writing dangerous books, taking great risks. There has been, you know, books written about the Cold War that tend to focus on the institutions and the way that those institutions acted upon people. And that tends to sort of flatten the sort of the human character out of the story. You know, these writers were conflicted. They were hypocritical. They were very brave. They made mistakes. They were inconsistent. And I really, I felt that was a really important part of the story to tell, to show how kind of individual agency and the way that these characters thought about the world, these writers thought about it, came into conflict with these larger powers, you know, these larger institutions and agencies. But the problem was the cast kept getting bigger because, you know, there were more stories to tell and I had a lot of history to cover. But I was kind of reassured, strange enough, by Game of Thrones. Because, you know, people love that show. Well, yeah. But there's a huge cast and people can follow all these different interlinking stories, seemingly. And so I thought, you know, that's fine. It doesn't have to be just two or three. We can have a cast of 20, which is roughly where it ended up. Yeah. And you're right. I think it's very important to consider, and Dipetus, that your intensive work in this book kind of coincided with the primacy of Game of Thrones, which does show us that it's been a surprise to me, actually, how many people of so many different ages can follow multiple storylines diligently for a really long period of time. So whatever one thinks of that show, it's a wonderful example of sustained and complex storytelling. And, you know, I thought, you know, I mean, it wasn't a sort of direct model by any means. It shows how, you know, hungry people are for that kind of way of telling stories. The wire is another great example of incredibly complex overlapping stories. And I think a lot of what's being done in TV is really interesting. So I had the idea of wanting to do narrative history, which is somewhat kind of frowned upon in the Academy sometimes, because I thought people would respond to it. Yeah. And I am a little curious, especially because I also have both graduate studies in history and in literature and my own background. So this was particularly fascinating to me that you're kind of navigating this kind of interstitial area between, you know, literature and history. Did you find that that, in the end, now that you've done it and you have your book, do you see that as pretty successfully done and that they reflected well on each other in the way that you were hoping for, or what? That's a good question. I don't know. I can't really judge the success of it myself, but what I do every day with my students, I teach in an interdisciplinary department. So I work with students and try and teach them how to think about history and culture at the same time. Actually think about them as not being distinct. You know, a lot of the way that we teach the humanities is to sort of categorize things separately and to think about history, sociology, well, not the humanities, but social sciences. The literature and these different subjects, different cultures even, should be kind of taught and understood separately. And I think interdisciplinary studies is something that's actually making a lot of headway in education at all levels at the moment. And so it's what I do every day with my students. I'm teaching them, I'm trying to model this in the way that I talk about books and historical moments in the classroom to think about how things are represented as much as the sort of the historical facts behind them. So it was, it felt very, a natural extension of that work, a natural extension of my teaching to write in this kind of way and to think about literature and history as being, you know, two sides of the same coin rather than sort of distinct disciplines. So anybody who has seen the book knows there's plenty to it, right? So what I will say though is that there are two themes kind of jumped out at me. One of them being the relationship between art and the broader context in which that art is being produced. And the other is this question of complicity, which to me has been part of the human story from earliest times, in fact. So I'm going to ask you a couple of specific questions about each of those, but I invite you to be as kind of discursive in your answer as you'd like and also maybe an opportunity to bring up some of the writers that you specifically wrote about. So I was wondering if, whether probing this dynamic between the making of art and the context in which it's happening, whether probing that so thoroughly led you to any conclusions about an artist's responsibility to his or her art and also to the world around them and where you ended up with that. That's a really interesting subject. So at the same time as all this stuff was happening in the way that literature was taught and the way that in classrooms, in high schools in the U.S., in universities, there was this really strong idea that you should appreciate literature outside of its context. That literature was a sort of discreet, self-contained thing. You read a book and you read it within the rules that the book establishes for itself, and that's kind of a very appealing way of thinking about literature in some senses. A lot of writers still buy into that idea that when they write for within their world and then when it goes out into that world, the consequences are kind of not really on them. It's much, I think, murkier than that. It's less kind of clear-cut than that. And so a lot of the challenges the writers and I was talking about faced was they were writing at a time when there was real ideological division in the world, and when they put a book out that kind of seemed to support one of those sides, it would inevitably oppose the other, or if they put out a book that opposed one side, it would be supported by the other. A great example is George Orwell's 1984, which has since become a sort of a favorite book of sort of libertarians and the John Birch Society and kind of quite hard right political groups because it was seen as an attack on, exclusively on Soviet communism. Actually, it was an attack on, yes, Soviet totalitarianism, but also what was wrong with the sort of Democratic West, George Orwell, believed in kind of social democracy, essentially. So, but he had no real, you know, he would have thought he had no real control over what happened with his book, but as you sort of get into the details of it, you see that, you know, he did sort of not exactly collaborate, like he was complicit in some of his activities that leave a bad taste in the mouth now. I mean, he was involved, for example, in drawing up a list of names of writers who he felt were sort of communist fellow travelers or suspicious in one way or another, and he gave that to something called the Information Research Department, which was associated with MI6 and British Intelligence. I have to say the Information Research Department was like one that he could have come up with. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's, I mean, it's really troubling that stuff. In the same, you know, at the other end, you had Soviet dissidents who would write, you know, in incredibly pressured conditions, these novels, smuggle them out at great risk to themselves and the people that were helping, but they couldn't prevent those, even if they were essentially interested in forming the Soviet Union rather than sort of championing the West, their works were picked up by the CIA and championed in various different ways and it was impossible for them to remain apolitical or to be able to control the consequences of what happened to their books. So, complicity just was kind of inevitable and it was inevitable partly because literature was taken so seriously. I mean, it's hard to be complicit if people aren't taking literature that seriously because the stakes are so much lower. But as the stakes got higher, it was very difficult to avoid getting caught up in the ideological Cold War in one way or another. Yeah, so I am wondering, of course this is not what you set out to do, nor probably how you would see your own book, but I think people are always interested in good guys and bad guys and I'm wondering when it comes to complicity, when it comes to, you know, taking stands against the tide, et cetera, you cover a score of writers in good detail and then many, many others in your book. Who are the heroes and the villains that you would like to call out and on what basis? I mean, there were some people that are like uncomplicated villains, right? People who were just pretty shabby individuals. Alexander Fadiyev was a writer in the Soviet Union who just stitched everybody up and was informing on everybody to the KGB and, you know, was implicated in the deaths of many of his supposed friends. So you have people that are really on that, you know, the real sort of toadies on that end of things and you also have, there were some writers who were kind of brave in the things, in the kind of actions they took in their lives. I'm thinking here of Arthur Kusler, you know, who, you know, was in a jail in Franco-Spain who was chased around France by the Nazis, was in an internment camp in which he wrote part of Darkness at noon, then was managed to flee to the United Kingdom and was then imprisoned by the British because he'd been a communist agent in his earlier, in an earlier iteration. But he was also absolutely appalling to everybody in his life, especially women, you know, really, you know, reprehensible in his kind of personal life. So it's very hard. You can sort of admire a book that, some aspects of their life, but, you know, find them kind of unpleasant. There's very few that kind of come out, you know, wholly sort of molly pure and surprise. Yeah, I know. I mean, even Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn is probably the bravest writer in this book, right? He single-handedly took on the Kremlin and was just totally fearless. But then you, when he came over here, he gave this commencement speech at Harvard where he just told them all off, listening to rock and roll and like having fun and all that stuff. And he was a real sort of moral puritan and a kind of quite a hard-line religious guy. So, you know, his idea of what Russia should be was terrifying. Like, you know, if he'd actually achieved this kind of weird, Slavic, ethno-state that was, you know, celebrated the Orthodox Church, I don't think anybody would have been happy. But he was incredibly brave. I mean, I will say, you know, I like very much the people that I like in my book, Mary McCarthy, it was, you know, made tons of mistakes and, you know, got stuff wrong, but was very kind of engaging and ended up in the right place eventually. It was fearless, too. And Isaac Barble, the guy that died in the gulag or in the purges, he was kind of, he was even cracking jokes with the KGB as they took him off. Like, he sort of remained a kind of endearing character. In fact, when he was being interrogated, I mean, they tortured him. You can see the gaps in the interrogate. His KGB file was smuggled out by an intrepid researcher immediately after communism fell, and you can see these gaps where they tortured him. And he comes back and he confesses to crazy stuff, like being a spy on Soviet aviation. He'd never even been on the plane. But then it comes to the sort of the very end, the crux, and they've sort of broken him. And he actually, in his final trial where he was supposed to just admit all these... He actually tried to clear the names of everybody he'd implicated and said that he'd been tortured and he'd lied under pressure. And there was no audience there and he probably thought no one would ever see that. But that took tremendous courage to do that. And it's of a piece with who he was as a person, I think. Yeah, I mean, a truly noble act, obviously, that. But also I am struck by the fact that you told the story in that answer of both Kessler and Bobble. Kessler lives long enough, as it turns out, to suffer the consequences of his earlier behavior and also to reveal himself as, again, kind of reprehensible in the way that he treats people. Bobble tragically died early but also purer in that way, as far as we know. Interesting how that can play out too. It does. I mean, the martyrs can sometimes... We can look at them through rose-tinted glasses. I think, in Bobble's case, he was not somebody who was particularly self-aggrandizing, he was very sort of ironic in his treat for himself. But there's other people who, like Graham Greene, whose books are magnificent, but he's not a particularly admirable human being. I mean, you wouldn't necessarily trust him. But then maybe, you know, Le Carré is much more of a kind of morally upstanding person who's actually kind of stood up for some of the things that he believes and even when they put him under considerable pressure. Well, obviously, there is another... a future 700-page book or more in examining that tension between the artist and how he or she actually treats what kind of person they are versus what kind of art they produce. And certainly topical. So there you go. Free suggestion there. I wanted to just wrap up with a couple of more things before we turn it over to the audience. And one of those is to ask... is to give voice to some of the critiques when I was reading your book and also what people have written about it. There are a few critiques that emerge and I wanted to both give voice to those and how you to respond to them. I'll give you that opportunity. One of them has to do with the fact that there are a lot of writers depicted within the book and then there are writers who were left out. During who, if anyone, you might cite as examples of somebody who could or even maybe should from your vantage point right now have been included. Totally, yeah. I mean, it was really hard and, you know, as long enough as it is the idea of putting more in. But there were, there were many more that I wanted to include. Okay, so one was Joan Didion. Joan Didion did some incredible literary reportage from places like Salvador. She was really interested in some of the ways, you know, especially under Nixon, the sort of the grubby, like, deniable arms of the state were operating around the world. It ended up being a very difficult decision to choose between her and Giaconda Belly, who's a Nicaraguan poet that I write about later in the book, because Nicaragua and Salvador were so tied up together, if I'd written about them both, it would have sort of really unbalanced the latter half of the book, and I'd have had a lot about the sort of the crisis in Central America, possibly at the expense of what was going on in the rest of the world. Another writer is perhaps not as well known as he was a couple of decades ago, but is Richard Kaposinski, who's a Polish journalist who traveled everywhere in the world. He was in Angola during the Angolan War of the 1970s, which was another of these proxy conflicts that gets forgotten, which was just unbelievably brutal. The number of people that lost their lives in this kind of three-way battle, I mean Cuban forces were involved, the Americans and the West were helping the South Africans get involved. It was a really, it's a kind of brutal proxy war that I wanted to tell the story of, but it just was too difficult to get him into. And there were others, I mean, you could see perhaps a place for Whittaker Chambers, who wrote Witness, and to show how important writing could be in propping up McCarthyism in the 1950s, as opposed to telling the story of Howard Fast, which I do in the book, who was one of the writers persecuted by the House and American Activities Committee and McCarthy, there were also a number of other writers like Fast, like Lillian Hellman, great playwright. She remained pretty loyal to Moscow, long after many other people had sort of abandoned them, and that's fascinating, and she had a real feud with Mary McCarthy, who's one of the main writers. So that was really a tough decision, it was between her and Howard Fast, because again, I didn't want to spend hundreds of pages on just the Red Scare, but that would have been a great story. I think it would have been just as fascinating to tell the story of Lillian Hellman as someone like Howard Fast. Well, I asked you about people who weren't included, and also a source of controversy as somebody who was, and that is, some people are just curious about not only the fact that he's in there, but how much time you give to Kim Philby, and I'll let you go ahead and explain both why and who he is and what his significance is. So Kim Philby isn't really a writer, but he isn't a writer, he's a spy. He was a British spy, who I'm sure as many of you know, was actually secretly working for the Soviet Union, and he was also like, not just a spy, but like way high in the hierarchy of MI6, so much so that he was actually coordinating between the British and the Americans, and he helped establish a network of other spies known as the Cambridge Spies, that were sort of busy hollowing out what was left of British intelligence after the Second World War. So the reason I included him is because he's the glue that sticks together a lot of the writers that I'm interested in, but he also represents something about the way that spying and writing and literature kind of interconnected in fascinating ways. So he was Graham Greene's boss at MI6 during the Second World War, and they became good friends, and Graham Greene ended up writing about some of those experiences later. He was also a figure who obsessed John Le Carré and became, his story became essentially the plot of Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy, and he also became the source of contention between Greene and Le Carré. And it was one of, it was a kind of way of thinking about the ethics of the Cold War. Greene was happy to think that what Philby did was kind of okay, because it was done out of commitment to what he really believed in. To Le Carré, Philby's crimes were unforgivable, and I really wanted to set that up because for the ending of the book, when Philby is dying, he asks, he meets both Greene and Le, well, he meets Greene and invites Le Carré to come and see him when they visit Gorbachev's Moscow. And he meets with Greene and they have a kind of, they reminisce about the old times, and Greene had written the foreword to Philby's memoir. And then he, when Le Carré's in Moscow, he invites Le Carré to come to meet him with the goal of having Le Carré write hit, the second volume of his memoir is the kind of real true story that's not been kind of shadow written by the KGB or supervised by the KGB, I should say. And Le Carré refuses. And it's, despite, you know, his desperate curiosity to meet this kind of fascinating figure who had been obsessed with all his life, he refuses to see him because he thinks ultimately that was going too far. And I think that that gets to this side, some of the idea of where your moral boundaries could be set in the Cold War. And Kim Philby's a great way, I think, of exploring those and thinking about the way that, yeah, that espionage and deniability and untrustworthiness just kind of sort of bled into the fabric of how we think about the Cold War and ultimately how we relate to governments, you know, I mean, and to the state. It's easy to see how as a Soviet citizen you would, and the recent TV series Chernobyl has been a great example of this, be kind of deeply distrustful of what the state was doing and what it was telling you and the accounts it gave to you of what was true and not. But the Cold War was really when, especially Americans lost trust in its own government. Most spectacularly over Vietnam and the fact that three separate presidents just lied to the public about Vietnam, but even earlier with Eisenhower before being kind of lured into these kind of lies of convenience into this idea of plausible deniability. And, you know, truth and how the sort of the looseness with which an idea of truth and honesty was treated during the Cold War was fascinating to me and it's obviously something that really plays into the idea of making fiction, making literature, making things up. And then you've got someone like Philby who made everything up for a living but from very much maligned purposes. He made up a whole life for himself. Well, no better segue could you have given me than that to the last topic that I want to talk about before we turn it over to the audience and that is the current day. And the fact that I know that you earlier this week had an op-ed published in the New York Times. Congratulations, by the way. In which you discuss the fact that there are authoritarian regimes in multiple places in the world right now doing their level best to silence, squelch, dissent in every way they can including in the fields of literature and journalism. So I wanted to just, you know, invite you to elaborate either on that or anything else that you see as a really strong parallel to the world that we see around us right now. One of the things I wanted to do in that op-ed was to talk about books in particular because one of the things I sort of from looking at all these different news stories from Egypt to Turkey to obviously places like North Korea and Iran, the American prison library, the school libraries that are placed under constant pressure to remove books. But really in those authoritarian regimes abroad I was fascinated by how people were starting to really go for books again. Like in Putin's Russia, I remember speaking to a writer, a Russian writer who said that, you know, since, well first of all it was, you know, freedom of speech was supposedly part of the Russian Constitution after the Soviet Union collapsed and Putin just didn't seem to care. Like if you wrote books about stuff, if you cared about cable TV, he did care about investigative journalists as many of those journalists found out to their peril. And the internet, right? And when I think a sort of real inflection point with this was the Arab Spring when suddenly it was thought of, look, you know, the internet is allowing people to organize. People are able to rally dissent through Twitter and other media. And the internet could be a really powerful force for people to kind of fight back against authoritarian regimes. And that hasn't lasted. In fact, the authoritarian regimes have become very smart at using the internet to monitor people. The most sort of, I don't know, whether it's extreme or fascinating example of this is what's happening in China with the Uyghur population, the Muslim population in the west of the country who, you know, are forced to have an app downloaded onto their phones. There's like facial recognition technology being built in public spaces. China has got a firewall, the Great Firewall as it's known that prevents people from accessing certain types of technology. And suddenly it looks actually like the internet is not actually the answer but actually might make things worse for distance. And in that context, it was fascinating that Beijing chose to crack down on this little bookshop in Hong Kong. Like, basically kidnapped five people who were working in this bookshop, took them to the mainland. There's different legal systems between Hong Kong and... As we well know now. Well, exactly. And this was almost a foreshadowing of what's now happened because this was all about ideas of rendition and how you take people to face legal consequences with these two different systems and the changes in the law would have made it much easier to grab people like these booksellers. Apparently, I mean, I've not read them, but apparently a lot of the books they were selling are these kind of salacious portraits of powerful members of the Communist Party, sort of scandal fiction stuff. But they felt threatened by this and that sort of fascinated me. Then Turkey just announced that it had taken 300,000 books out of libraries and burned them. I believe that you described that in your op-ed as they kind of did it gleefully. Right. It was part of the purge. It was part of the attack on the political opposition that is perceived to have been led by this guy, Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania. But it's books again. And it's interesting to me that actually the thing that was supposed to be limiting about books, you know, that they're bulky. It's an old technology. You have to carry them around. Right. And the book was dying, which we've heard a lot. But actually, you know, books are unplugged and can be passed from hand to hand. There's an element of trust in who you share it with and it's very hard to sort of surveil people through books in a way that phones and computers and e-readers and whatever you have, it's obviously going to be more problematic. So that struck me as something interesting that books were being targeted again. And the worry is that, as we saw in the case of Jamal Khashoggi, that the response from the White House is very different to what it has been ever since FDR and before him, you know, made sort of the support of political dissent, literary freedom of expression, a kind of central plank. Now, you know, I'm fully aware of the many times that the U.S. has got that wrong and the West has been hypocritical, not just the U.S., the Western Europe too, in which dissidence it's decided to support and when and for what reason. But, you know, there have been many moments, including moments in my book, where supporting someone like Solzhenitsyn or Harville during Detente actually undermined the goals of the sort of geopolitical goals of the White House or of the U.S.'s allies. But they felt compelled to do it, because it was actually the right thing to do and it was consistent with the positions they'd taken previously on Stalinism, on Nazism. Right, and an actual reflection of real American, I shouldn't put it that way, but of traditional American values built into the Constitution. So the sort of absence of that and the idea that you have a president who sort of doesn't read and doesn't really understand history at all or doesn't really seem to care about these things. However one feels about, you know, issues like the economy or even things like immigration, it is that the ahistoricism of what he does is really dangerous and it also, if we then show a disregard for some of these issues within our own countries, but then also leave hanging dissidents abroad, you know, what really is to stop an authoritarian regime doing unspeakable things to the people that disagree with it if the most that Saudi Arabia got was a slap on the wrist for what happened to Khashoggi and I don't want to talk about that in detail because of kids here, but like, you know, the performative violence of what happened to him was what it was about, you know, it wasn't just getting rid of him. That was not incidental. It's the same thing with the killing of Litvinenko in London, you know, for the former KGB officer who was defying Putin. There are many ways to kill someone, you know, using a kind of weapons grade, chemical agent at a sushi bar in downtown London is making a point. And, you know, there's been revelations this week that Trump didn't refuse to sort of back British accounts of Soviet intelligence, Russian intelligence work, FSB intelligence work in the UK. Well, I thank you very much. Oh, thank you very much. I have had my fun, that's for sure. Now, your guys turn. The way that we'll do it is just raise your hand and I'll call on you and I will, for the sake of the recording, just repeat your question even though I'm sure that Duncan will be able to hear it. So just bear with me as we do that and then Duncan will be yours. Yes, Vim. Yeah, so the question is the rise, the dramatic rise in literacy after the Bolsheviks came to power. Yeah, it's a great question and a great point to raise in that, you know, the Bolshevik Revolutionary was, you know, and the Revolution was an emancipatory project in many ways. This was trying to, you know, the lives of ordinary Russians under the Tsar were miserable. And education was a big part of what communism was about, improving literacy and making people's lives better. I mean, it was also a great way of, you know, if people were more literate then, you know, if you wanted to communicate a certain message, it was much easier to communicate that message to them too. But I don't think we need to be that cynical about it. I mean, there were many aspects of communism that were, yeah, emancipatory and thinking about social justice and making a fairer society. And literacy was a spectacular example of that. You know, there's another, it was funny, I was listening to something the other day, another regime that was incredible in increasing literacy was Saddam Hussein's in Iraq. You know, literacy under Saddam was a similar sort of ray. Again, he started off as this kind of emancipatory project as a project about kind of, you know, raising people's expectations and trying to create a more literate society. So that was true. And, you know, perhaps for that reason, literature was and remains incredibly powerful in international imagination. More so than we can ever really appreciate. You know, you travel around Russia and East New York, you see the statues of great writers, you know, in major squares all over the place, Pushkin especially in Russia, you know, especially resonant for them. The problem was, of course, is that Stalin used that literacy to his own ends as this, you know, it was a totalitarian regime that he wanted to establish. He wanted to control all aspects. He was incredibly fastidious in doing so. I mean, he read everything. And some of the evidence that has come out since the collapse of the Soviet Union is just how controlling it was over the fates of individual poets and dramatists and writers. And he was also ghostwriting opeds in Pravda and places because he was so intent on controlling the message that went out there. So, yeah, I hope that answers your question. I hope that answers your question. Well, in 1984, you know, what Winston does or the department he's in is sort of translating old works of literature into Newspeak, you know, into a more simplified, easier, more digestible version. But, you know, there's also, I mean, obviously what I wrote about for the New York Times was kind of pretty pessimistic in some senses. But, you know, independent bookshops are doing pretty well. Like, book sales are doing pretty well. Like, fiction is still selling at encouraging levels, especially actually in the UK and the US. You know, this library is full all the time. There are some good signs, especially people trying to re-engage with ideas of culture and history in these embattled times, you know. Sure. Thank you very much. So, the question relates to the proliferation in our world of information, both reliable and unreliable. And what does that do to, you know, to people's sense of trust in the information that they're hearing? It's fascinating because it is something that is so different between these eras. I mean, one thing that's always interesting is to think about how much of a communal culture people of my generation or even of my parents' generation had compared to the culture of the students that I teach. So, you know, in the United States in the 50s and 60s there were three television channels. And so everybody watched the same shows and everybody had a kind of a sense of community based around what the kind of culture that they consumed. There were fewer books published, people read, and there was certainly no internet. So there was a real sense that culture was something that a lot of people were invested in the same sort of cultural objects, the same sort of things that were being produced. And that started to atomize, of course, with cable TV and the changes in the publishing industry, especially in the 80s and 90s. And now to the point where people have a very sort of curated experience of culture, like people are able to sort of consume what they want and at most they sort of share that with the sort of subgroup. But there's no sort of national sort of sense of culture that kind of unites people. There's not like TV shows that everybody watches. I mean, maybe Game of Thrones is as close as you can get to something like that. But this is not a promo for Game of Thrones. It really isn't. I don't know where this would come from. So what the political consequences of that, I think, you know, that's where it's a little bit worrying because you saw the, what's so fascinating about the sort of the troll farm stuff, the idea of this kind of Russian building in which these guys were just throwing out Facebook memes was kind of how crude it all was and how easily you could see through most of it and how kind of unsubtle it was compared to much of the sort of the ideals of what cultural propaganda constituted in the Cold War era where, you know, one of the key stories that I try and tell in the book is that the CIA were kind of supporting like social democrats and left-of-center writers because they wanted it to be a kind of more, they felt that was a better alternative to communism, but they also didn't want to support kind of really like hard line anti-communists. So they took this kind of much more sophisticated and thoughtful approach to how they wanted to do their propaganda. Whereas this stuff is, you know, like crazy lies about Hillary Clinton is, you know, it's worrying that a lot of that seemed to gain some traction or that even if it didn't, the idea that the Russians thought that it would speaks to the way that this stuff has become atomized and people are kind of consuming culture within a bubble. Same with the rise of conspiracy theories, you know, the QAnon stuff that a lot of people are buying into. You just, that can only be consumed within the privacy of, you know, your own laptop or with like-minded people because you start talking about QAnon or Pizza Gate and people are going to be, you know, regular people will just disabuse you of the absolute nonsense of it very quickly. So, I mean, it's hard to say you can't put a stopper back in and that would be a bad thing, but I think, you know, there is increasing interest in the way that we teach the humanities and the way that people are teaching in schools and helping people become better critical readers of this massive information and these new forms of information that perhaps we've been a little complacent with. Not everywhere, but perhaps in some place we've become a little complacent in helping people read and understand how people are seeking to manipulate them through the written word and through various different ways online. I have been told we have time for one more question and you're the winner. Easy one. Yeah, easy one. Sure. So, bearing in mind that there are all kinds of problems in that industrial complex, one question I wanted to ask you, I've been thinking about this for a while, given sort of what seems to me like some sort of existential identity confusion politically used in the West, post-Cold War, when you were writing this, did you mean nostalgia or the Cold War for that time period, the way in which I think having an enemy sharpens your sense of yourself or I might also think about smoothly enough civil rights that has to be firmly put in that context as well. Having this alternative rather quality. Were there any things about it that you could look at and say that was a time in which this was preferable, special. You haven't even felt it through that funding. Have you seen something? Sorry. Oh, sorry, yes. Just to distill that as best I can, the question is, you know, comparing the world of the Cold War versus the world that we are in today, you know, do you have any nostalgia for that period? Yeah. So, Le Carré wrote at the end of the Cold War that the right side had lost, but the wrong side had won. You know, there was this sort of sense that there was a real, in the 90s, there was a real triumphalism about victory in the Cold War. The sort of, the end of history for Kiyama and he gets, he really gets, it's dragged into the centre of that and we talk about him a little bit in the book, but this is this idea that, okay, we're done. Like, this was the last, this was the last buggy man. We did the Nazis, now we've done the Soviet Union and now it's, this is the best system. We've come to the idea of the best system and we will now see the spread of democratic capitalism around the world and people's lives will get better and quality of life will go up and it's all like that. That's the history of this idea. And then there was the Yugoslav War and then suddenly the idea of kind of ethnic tension and conflict but that was seen as sort of a bump in the road and then there was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism which interestingly, you know, was totally tied up with the way the Cold War had been prosecuted but you know, a lot of the Mujahideen who were fighting in Afghanistan had got themselves, actually they weren't American weapons, they were Czech weapons that the Americans had been given to them, vast CIA investment in paying for these guys because they were fighting the Soviet Union and you know, it seemed like a good deal to make lo and behold, unintended consequences and the same, you know, when the Berlin Wall came down one of the KGB agents actually who was sort of stationed in East Germany at the time was Vladimir Putin who, you know, saw this sort of great shaming. He was a reformist, he believed in Gorbachev but he also believed in the Soviet Union as power, Russia as a power and that humiliation was another one that sort of had unintended consequences that would come back to life. So the Cold War sort of has its legacies and that kind of complacency at the end of it has not, history has not looked kindly upon people that brought into that too easily. Having said that, we do live in a moment that's very nostalgic for the Cold War whether, and we think about the culture that we can see in shows like The Americans and Bridge of Spies and the umpteen, the carrier adaptations and this kind of fascination with this period partly because of the clear lines of demarcation and the sense that ultimately the West was having to hold itself up to a slightly more, a higher standard in the sort of grubby, cynical, real politic of a Pompeo or somebody. But then you look at some of the stuff that did happen during the Cold War and the way that the, the sort of the flip side of that is the the kind of the way that the conflict with the Soviet Union was used an excuse to do a lot of unspeakable things and to also behave towards American citizens in, you know, Coventel Pro and all these kind of infiltration of people's everyday lives by the FBI and the CIA including the Civil Rights Movement a lot of the people in the Civil Rights Movement because of perceived communist threat that's not something to be nostalgic for and, you know it's why it's important that people keep thinking about and writing about and reflecting on the Cold War, you know one of the things that perhaps really shocked me there were many things that shocked me and she sort of read the the Psy Hershey's account of of he lie again and which was this, you know, massacre during the Vietnam War I mean you know it is one of the hardest things I've ever had to read and the Cold War created that situation where you know young American men did those things to people to other living human beings and felt that it was part of some sort of larger goals so I do sometimes get nostalgic for the kind of the sophistication and culture of the of the statecraft and of the kind of politicians that we had and that were forced to have because they had to really have an A game which is not always true of the current crop on both sides of the Atlantic but not really for the Cold War to call I think there was a lot there's too much in that history that is too bloody and too bleak Well on that sunny note