DAVID SAVILL

The Cold War is back. Both in academic circles and popular culture. The popularity of Tom Robb Smith’s Child 44, (given a big budget Hollywood treatment this year), has not a little to do with the spending power of a generation who are both nostalgic and curious about the geo-political environment which shaped them. The same generation is now employed in Higher Education, and producing titles like The New Cold War, and The Fall of the Soviet Union (in academia, the Soviet Uni

Sehii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevskyi professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University. It is no surprise then, that his account of the final days of the Soviet Union, puts Ukraine at the heart of events. But this is an explicit aim. Plohky's compelling narrative history has been written as a corrective to public perceptions that, as George Bush claimed while on the '92 election trail, America had "won the cold war", (something Bush himself didn't really appear to beli