Just been reading an excellent article in today's Sunday Times by Brian Moynahan which looks back on the momentous year of 1989. he makes a point about how used we'd all become to the Cold War in the West:
"In Britain, it was alarming in rare moments of crisis, but most often it was a sort of permanent background hum: woolly caps with CND badges, spy novels by Len Deighton, V-bombers at the Farnborough airshow, and lots of initials: ICBM, BAOR, MIRV, MiG, SS-20. The vast range of Soviet rocketry aimed at us was out of sight, of course, and our squaddies were in their bases in West Germany. The protests were inward: Ban the Bomb meant ban our bomb."
It is incredible now to think back on this year which totally altered the geo-political structure of Europe, in much the same way as the 1848 revolutions gave a warning to the ancien regimes of Europe. They fell sixty years later; the communist regimes in Europe fell, one by one, over the space of a few months. Of course, this also meant a seismic shift for thriller writers like Deighton, Le Carre and others, who found one of their principle dramatic constructs - the divide Europe - disappear almost overnight.
Well worth a read.
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