Cold War Noir: 10 Novels That Defined an Anxious Era

The Cold War was not an event. It was the air you breathed.

I could not remember being without it even if I was about as aware of it as air itself. It was there. It was air, it was smoke—it was the smoke curling up from ashes of Berlin in 1945.
So. . .we breathed this chilly air for a lifetime.

I’m a child of the Age of Austerity, born just after the hot war, which blended almost seamlessly into the cold war. The last relic of the hot war was rationing, which lasted in Britain until 1957 (about as long as it took Russia to release the last German POWs), although most food items had come off by 1952. I still have my ration book. Pinned up above my desk as a ‘memento-I-know-not what.’ It was a potent symbol of the war we had won, lingering into the new era, the news from Berlin and Korea, of the war we could not win. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/cold-war-noir-10-novels-that-defined-an-anxious-era/ 

[G. Greene, I. Fleming, R. Condon, J. le Carré, L. Deighton, I. McEwan, J. Kanon, A. Monroe]