all of Europe, and that, in Britain, would mean high unemployment. Misfortune again came when some Irish terrorists assassinated Ian Gow, a wise adviser, and his successor as Parliamentary Private Secretary was not, by far, of the same class (he even wanted to extract a public oath of loyalty from the MPs). The middle party took Gow’s seat at a by-election, with a very large majority. There was of course the perennial stalking of the foreign stage, but Margaret Thatcher’s great moment had passed, with the waning of the Soviet Union. Her last act was to stiffen the resolve of the American President, George Bush, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
The next round of exhausting European wrangling was set for Rome, with the Italians chairing proceedings. Early in October, the concession, to join the ERM, was at last made. But the Europeans wanted more, an advance towards the Delors stages for proper unification. In their view it mattered much more, now, because, without formal unity, an enlarged Germany might be a great and malevolent force once more. One of the ‘stages’ involved an irrevocable commitment to monetary union (as it happens, with fixed exchange rates planned for 1994). Mrs Thatcher hated the ‘grand and vague words’ of these European occasions, and disliked what they portended. She said, about the tired metaphor of not taking the European train as it was leaving the station, that ‘people who get on a train like that deserve to be taken for a ride’. She denounced the Italians’ ‘mess’ of a presidency, and said, in Parliament, in grand-actress style, ‘No, no and no’ to all three Delors proposals. Howe resigned, and wrote a powerful letter; when the party chairman attempted to explain this away, he spoke on 13 November very powerfully indeed in the House of Commons, apparently much of the statement at the dictation of his wife. And then Margaret Thatcher had to face re-election as leader of the party. She won, but by a very narrow margin and under a strange rule that required a second-round election. It was of course an extraordinary humiliation for an outstanding figure, though in British affairs it had happened before, not least to Churchill. Her ministers, on the whole, told her that they would not support her, and in the end Denis Thatcher told her that that was that. The next day, 22 November, there was a brief, tearful Cabinet. She broke down, and had to start the business again. Then she had to appear for a final Commons debate, on a motion of no confidence. She spoke with a command performance, perhaps her greatest speech ever; one of the greatest occasions in the history of the House of Commons. The eighties had been a magnificent counter-attack: just when the enemy thought it had won, its ammunition dump had exploded. The look on the faces of the seventies was a poem. But what did the eighties do, in England and America, with the victory of the ‘Seven Fat Years’? It had been in so many ways the best of times: Russia back in the Concert of Europe, China returning as a great world civilization, a recovered Germany with an entirely healthy relationship with her neighbours, an Atlantic that had recovered its vitality. There had been downsides to the eighties, perhaps those associated with democracy by the classical writers. But it had been the most interesting, by far, of the post-war decades.
Richard Pipes, in his two-volume Russian Revolution, had the good idea of naming the hundred essential books. My own list, with inevitable injustice, is even more of a thimble in an ocean. For general accounts, there are Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994), which is excellent on the troubles of capitalism, and Paul Johnson, Modern Times (1983), excellent on the troubles of Communism. In both books there is much with which creative disagreement happens. Obviously the uses of technology are enormously important in the making of this period, and it would be easy to list two- dimensional works of praise. They should be put in the context of David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old (2006), which shows that ‘modernism’ is not what it purports to be.
As a general account of the Cold War, I have mainly used a splendid French account, Georges-Henri Soutou’s La Guerre de Cinquante Ans (2001), but another French book, Andre Fontaine’s Apres eux le Deluge, de Kaboul a Sarajevo (1995), covers the last decade or so of Communism, very readably. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (2005), is a very efficient survey, and his The Long Peace (1987) bears re-reading, but see also David Reynolds, One World Divisible (2000). The world of arms negotiations was covered in admirable and dogged fashion by Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era (1998).
For the world of 1945, Tony Judt, Postwar (2005), and William I. Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe (2003), complement each other. I wonder if the Communist takeovers can ever be satisfactorily covered. Vojtech Mastny, in The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity (1996), is too much of a Menshevik Internationalist, but he intuits a great deal. Hugh Seton Watson wrote a book sixty years ago, when he was very young, The East European Revolution (1950), that has never been replaced. The Czechoslovak coup was covered by Karel Kaplan in a very dense book, The Short March (1986). Memoirs of the era, and of course the literature, are probably the best introduction, given that the story line, set in trade union minutes and the like, is not gripping. Nicholas Gage, Eleni (1983), is a superb story, but cf. David Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War (1995), C. M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece (1991), and Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (1958). David L. Bark and David Gress, in A History of West Germany (2 vols., 1993), cover everything thoroughly, but there are entertaining memoirs, e.g. Noel Annan, Changing Enemies (1995); see also Wolfgang Benz, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (3 vols., 1983). Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy (1990), and Jean-Pierre Rioux, La France de la Quatrieme Republique (1980), are very well crafted. I have a considerable weakness for Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory (1995), as an examination of the sometimes absurd illusions of the British.
The background to the Marshall Plan has been well examined from Western sources. Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (1989), and from a German perspective Gerd Hardach, Der Marshall Plan (1994), are important. They need to be complemented by Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51 (1984), and The European Rescue of the Nation-State (2000). W. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay (1978), covers the end of European empire, and cf. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars (2007). John Gillingham, European Integration 1950-2003 (2003), builds on the author’s examination of Jean Monnet and his works. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (1978), is still useful on American reactions.
On the history of the Soviet Union generally, John Keep, A History of the Soviet Union 1945- 1991 (2002), is useful, but see also Amy Knight, Beria (1993). William Taubman, Khrushchev (2003), David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (1994), Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts (1996), Stephane Courtois, Le Livre noir du communisme (1997), Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (1991), Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao (2006), and Jonathan Fenby, The Penguin History of Modern China (2009), have been my most important sources for the Communist world in the post-war period. Simon Leys, The Chairman’s New Clothes (1971, trans. 1977), is another wonderful book; also, when it appeared, unpopular.
On the end of European empire, see Keith Kyle, Suez (1991), Scott Lucas, Britain and Suez (1996), Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (1973), Georges Fleury, La Guerre en Algerie (1993), Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall (2000), Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars (1984), and Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle (2 vols., 1993). Rene Remond, Le Retour de De Gaulle (1983), is a good summary of the problems of the late Fourth Republic.
‘The Sixties’ is an enormous subject. I have a weakness for Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (1998), but it was devastatingly reviewed by Roger Kimball, whose own contemptuous remarks as to universities were recorded in Tenured Radicals (1990). The same theme, with a very brave attempt to associate it with longer-term factors, comes up in Allan Bloom, The Closing of
