The blinking and the blinkered

摘要

Where does history end and current affairs begin? John Lewis Gaddis, who is often described as the dean of cold-war historians, has no doubts about his own special subject. To his students at Yale University, many of whom were still children when the confrontation with the Soviets ended in 1989, he writes, the cold war is "history: not all that different from the Peloponnesian War". With a mixture of wistfulness and wonderment, Mr Gaddis notes: "When I talk about Stalin and Truman, even Reagan and Gorbachev, it could as easily be Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander the Great." It is partly in deference to a new generation that Mr Gaddis has decided to write a fresh and admirably concise history of the cold war. With disarming frankness, he also admits that his agent had spotted a gap in the market. But Mr Gaddis's latest work avoids the obvious trap of simply being a summary of his earlier writings, the historian's equivalent of a "Greatest Hits" album.