The bibliographical essays in the three volumes of the Cambridge History of the Cold War aim at being selective and critical overviews of the literature available in each subfield of historical investigation. The entries are written by the authors of the chapters in the main text, with additions, deletions, and crossreferences suggested by the editors. Readers may want to look at the bibliographic entries in more than one volume to get an overview of the literature on a particular issue or region.

The Cold War and the intellectual history of the late twentieth century

There exists no single volume on the intellectual history of the last third of the twentieth century, or even one that would convincingly cover the postwar period in Western Europe or the United States. A useful collection of essays on political thought in the twentieth century as a whole is Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); also still useful is Karl Dietrich Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984). Books that successfully weave together accounts of European political history and judgments on some of the major developments in European political thought are Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005) and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1998); still useful is George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (London: Phoenix, 2000).