The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey Along Europe's Cold War Border

Description

The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, north to south, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. New generations have grown up, freed from the tensions and restrictions of the past. But what do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What has happened to the people and places they divided? What have they left in their wake? In a major new book, Timothy Phillips travels the route of the Iron Curtain from deep inside the Arctic Circle to the meeting point of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. He explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense between 1945 and 1989, and where the world's most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins. The people he meets bear vivid witness to times of change. There are those who look back on the Cold War with nostalgia and affection. Others despise it, unable to forgive the hard and sometimes lost decades that their families, friends and nations endured. These old fault lines have much to tell us about Europe now and about our societies' current disputes - over borders, and about belonging and the meaning of progress. The Curtain and the Wall transports the reader across 5,000 kilometres of Europe and through eight decades, to show how one of the defining stories of the 20th century continues to shape our world today.

Timothy Phillips is the author of The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians, and the Jazz Age (Granta, 2017) and Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (Granta, 2008). He grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London. He holds a doctorate in Russian from Oxford University and has written and spoken widely on British and Russian history.