Britain's Cold War: Culture, Modernity and the Soviet Threat

The cultural history of the Cold War has been characterized as an explosion of fear and paranoia, based on very little actual intelligence. Both the US and Soviet administrations have since remarked how far off the mark their predictions of the other's strengths and aims were. Yet so much of the cultural output of the period – in television, film, and literature – was concerned with the end of the world. Here, Nicholas Barnett looks at art and design, opinion polls, the Mass Observation mov...