It is said that Russia’s imaginative writers are safe from the attentions of President Putin because he believes that literature (unlike TV or the internet) is entirely unimportant. Meanwhile, President Trump’s vision of the US as the world’s greatest nation clearly does not include its greatest writers: was there any presidential response to the deaths of either Philip Roth, last year, or Toni Morrison, more recently? ’Twas not ever thus. Duncan White’s new history of writers’ involvement in the cold war, a big book full of grim case studies, is also a weirdly encouraging reminder that literature can unsettle the powerful. In this account of the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism, covering the half-century from the late 1930s to the collapse of the Soviet Union, writers sometimes seem more influential than politicians, spies or generals.
