Taylor Downing

Jeremy Isaacs

A history of the Cold War ranges from the defeat of Germany at the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union

An Illustrated History, 1945-1991

Cold War

Never Mind the Moon

Sir Jeremy Isaacs has spent more than 45 years in television, and has witnessed, and in some cases instigated, the major changes that made it the cultural force it is today. His first post in 1958 was with Granada; although a commercial company, Granada's ethos was closest to that of the BBC, and provided Isaacs with a solid start. After moving on to Rediffusion, Isaacs joined the BBC in 1965, editing Panorama, before a disagreement caused him to return to Rediffusion - now Thames - where he made The World at War. When a censorship issue provoked him to leave and go freelance, he continued to make ground-breaking programmes, and when in 1979 Channel 4 began the search for their first chief executive, Isaacs was the ideal candidate. He engineered a deliberately ecletic mix of programmes and put television into the hands of small, entrepreneurial film-makers; short-lived as after Isaac's departure in 1986 the channel became dependent on revenue from its advertisers. After a period as General Director of the Royal Opera House, and then making some award-winning documentary series with Ted Turner, Isaacs is currently heading Artworld for Sky.

A Life in Television

Look Me in the Eye

Peter Hennessy

Cold War is the story of the half-century since the end of the Second World War - the story of our lives. Its framework is the confrontation, military and ideological, between two great powers that dominated the world during these years. It is a story of crises and conflict on a global scale: from the Berlin Blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the tanks in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest and Prague, to spies, student riots and encounters in space. In Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs and Taylor Downing record epic history through the detail of individual human experience: the recollections not only of statesmen whose decisions led to these momentous events, but also of the ordinary men and women whose lives were bound up in these years of conflict. Cold War is the first comprehensive history for the general reader to benefit from the recent opening of Soviet, East European and Chinese archives as well as formerly classified American documents. In a driving narrative that it both gripping and informative, the true story of the Cold War can at last be told.

Jeremy Isaacs

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