Battle of wills

With this impressively ambitious and wide-ranging study, Martin Sixsmith – former BBC correspondent in Moscow and author of such works as Philomena and Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East – adds a fascinating chapter to Cold War scholarship.

Sixsmith does a good job of presenting the essential narrative of the Cold War. He covers its post-Second World War inception in the Truman-Stalin years, as well as other key events including the Cuban missile crisis – the 1962 military standoff that brought the US and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict – and the Vietnam War. The improvement in relations between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev