Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recent events in Eastern Europe--the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the Solidarity government in Poland, the disintegration of Hungarian Communist Party--have validated the trillions of dollars spent in the long and costly struggle in which the United States has been engaged since World...
...narrative's first volume, Berlin Game, began with heavy irony, as Deighton's hero Bernard Samson, a British agent watching for trouble at the Wall, asked his friend Werner Volkmann, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann answered sourly, "Nearly a quarter of a century." Spy Line, set in the present, starts off with a joke that might have been heard over coffee at a Tory think tank: "Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!" Its pivotal violence is a bloody shoot-out during an attempted escape along...
...ridden, class-clotted English intelligence apparatus. A considerable part of the fun of the author's nearly endless chronicle has always been his seething contempt, and Samson's, for England's upper-class bumblers, and for Oxbridge leftists of the Kim Philby stamp. Readers who have followed Samson from Berlin Game will recall that his very upper-class wife Fiona, also an English intelligence agent, defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less...
...this has bubbled cheerfully in the two novels that followed Berlin Game in Deighton's first Samson trilogy, Mexico Set and London Match, and then in Spy Hook, the beginning of a second trilogy, which has Samson under suspicion and on the run from his own colleagues. The current Spy Line sags just a bit, but it will lead, readers are assured, to resolution in a promised final thriller, Spy Sinker. Will Fiona and Samson retire to a cottage in Cornwall and argue over lunch? More important, will Deighton or anyone else find a menace to replace the Wall? Lite...
Even Franklin Roosevelt was posthumously excoriated for "giving away" Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at Yalta (rhymes with Malta). Harry Truman stood up to Stalin at Potsdam and hung tough over Iran, Berlin and Korea, but he still ended up being pilloried by a couple of junior Senators named Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who called Truman's Secretary of State the dean of the "cowardly college of Communist containment." Two decades later, the New Nixon's policy of detente ran into a buzz saw of bipartisan anti-Soviet opposition. When a Watergate-wounded Nixon went...