Based upon official documents released to the National Archives, distinguished historian David Caute, discovers that the British state had a surprising interest in a number of writers, artists, scientists and historians who posed no threat to national security at all. Those at the heart of British media, culture, and academia, it seems, were perpetually under suspicion as potential subversives. Caute here exposes the massive state operation that went to extraordinary lengths to surveil their every move. Guilt by association was paramount. Letters were opened, phones were intercepted, private homes were bugged and citizens were placed under physical surveillance by Special Branch agents.
Among the targets of surveillance are found such prominent figures as Arthur Ransome, Paul Robeson, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Kingsley Martin, Michael Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, Joseph Losey, Michael Foot and Harriet Harman. More than 200 victims are listed here but further MI5 files will be released to the National Archives.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
What could have been a minor academic squabble is transformed here into a wide-ranging discussion of some of the major ideological disputes of the 20th century - Marxism, Zionism, liberalism and the significance of the Russian revolution. * The Economist (praise for Isaac and Isaiah) * Readers . . . will find themselves informed and absorbed by Mr. Caute's portrait of the intellectual battles of the Cold War. -- Adam Kirsch * Wall Street Journal (praise for Isaac and Isaiah) * Caute's new book is the most authoritative study to date of politics and literature during the Cold War and one of the wisest and witties books of cultural criticism to appear for many years. -- John Gray * Literary Review (praise for Politics and the Novel During the Cold War) *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 129 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-83976-246-8 (9781839762468)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
David Caute, a quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. His recent books include Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic; Politics and the Novel During the Cold War; and The Dancer Defects.
