In his book The Curtain and the Wall, Timothy Phillips travels along the full length of the old Iron Curtain – from the Arctic Circle to Turkey’s eastern border – tracing the history of the Cold War and meeting the people who live with its legacy. Phillips chronicles the transformations and upheavals Europe has undergone since the fall of the Soviet Union through interviews with the people he meets.
The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, north to south, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. New generations have grown up freed from the tensions and restrictions of the past. But what do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What has happened to the people and places they divided? What have they left in their wake?
Timothy Phillips explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense between 1945 and 1989, and where the world’s most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins, a place of hope but also a place that cannot fully free itself from the past.
Timothy Phillips is the author of The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey Along Europe’s Cold War Border; The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians, and the Jazz Age and Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1. He holds a doctorate in Russian from Oxford University and has written and spoken widely on British and Russian history.
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Drinks are served in the Members’ Room after the lecture