It was forty-two years ago that Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain." This speech, according to Fraser Harbutt, set forth the basic Western ideology of the coming East-West struggle. It was also a calculated move within, and a dramatic public definition of, the Truman administration's concurrent turn from accommodation to confrontation with the Soviet Union. It provoked a response from Stalin that goes far to explain the advent of the Cold War a few weeks later. This book is at once a fascinating biography of Winston Churchill as the leading protagonist of an Anglo-American political and military front against the Soviet Union and a penetrating re-examination of diplomatic relations between the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. in the postwar years. Pointing out the Americocentric bias in most histories of this period, Harbutt shows that the Europeans played a more significant part in precipitating the Cold War than most people realize. He stresses that the same pattern of events that earlier led America belatedly into two world wars, namely the initial separation and then the sudden coming together of the European and American political arenas, appeared here as well. From the combination of biographical and structural approaches, a new historical landscape emerges. The United States appears at times to be the rather passive object of competing Soviet and British maneuvers. The turning point came with the crisis of early 1946, which here receives its fullest analysis to date, when the Truman administration in a systematic but carefully veiled and still widely misunderstood reorientation of policy (in which Churchill figured prominently) led the Soviet Union into the political confrontation that brought on the Cold War.

Brings together agenda-setting essays that illuminate the complex relationship between ideas and political activity in modern British history. Ideas matter in modern British political life: culture, thought and belief are integral to the fabric of politics, high and low, foreign and domestic. They are woven into the day-to-day business of debate, policy and decision-making. This book shows how and why they have mattered so much. Inspired by the work of Jonathan Parry, it explores the cultural and intellectual influences on politics both formal and informal since the turn of the nineteenth century. Featuring original interventions by some of the world's leading historians, the essays in the volume are organised around themes of central relevance to the understanding of modern British political history. They explore a wide range of subjects across political life and its intellectual and cultural hinterlands, including constitutionalism and international political thought, anticolonial activism, race and imperial commemoration, female political thinkers, parliament, monarchy and the law, the politics of religion, and patriotism and national identity. This is an agenda-setting text that will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex relationship between ideas and political activity in modern British history. Paul Readman is Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. Dr Geraint Thomas is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. Contributors: Michael Bentley, John Bew, Paul Bew, David Cannadine, Matthew Cragoe, Tom Crewe, Ben Griffin, Boyd Hilton, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Joanna Lewis, Helen McCarthy, Alex Middleton, Susan D. Pennybacker, Kathryn Rix, James Thompson, Philip Williamson