White illuminates the precarious place of literature in a world swarming with spies eager to manipulate—even to enlist—authors to advance their shadowy agendas. Readers witness the ruthless brutality of Soviet authorities imprisoning and executing dissident writers, but they also penetrate the deceptions of American and British intelligence agencies playing authors as pawns. A compelling reminder of literature’s influence—and vulnerability—in a world of power politics.

... [White] captures something essential about McCarthy ... Mr. White unfolds the sordid tale of Soviet literary history through all its later decades of crackdowns, thaws and renewed panics ... Tonally judicious, Mr. White remains alert to democratic excess in combatting horrors on the totalitarian side. But touches of what Jeane Kirkpatrick used to call 'moral equivalence' inevitably result. Having done such a good job showing the sufferings of writers under Nikolai Yezhov ’s NKVD, the author might reconsider writing, 500 pages later, that 'the paranoia of the Cold War was bipolar' ... With so much background to be filled in, the book sometimes strays from its specific, subtitular mission and turns into a history of the Cold War itself. One wishes Mr. White hadn’t bothered to deal with Kim Philby at such length ... consistently absorbing, its prose clear and its syntax sure-footed. But a certain entropy threatens the book. As it flies in different directions, chronology hits some air pockets ... Here and there an error catches the eye ... One of the virtues of his book is the way it makes a reader acknowledge how close the weary West came to losing its nerve.

... absorbing ... This is a long book, but it was a long war ... reads like a thriller ... this is also a book about personal and political liberty; about the freedom to write, mock and dissent; about truth, lies and wilful ignorance ... If some of the stories are familiar, the scale of White’s book means there is always an author and an anecdote you haven’t heard ... [an] ambitious, intelligent, searching history.

... breezily readable ... Orwell’s story is hardly unfamiliar, and although White retells it with gusto, he has nothing new to say ... As a study of literary culture during the Cold War, White’s book is a mixed bag. He enjoys biographical gossip, but has surprisingly little to say about what his chosen characters actually wrote. All the same, his book raises some haunting questions.

Two of White’s chapters are devoted to Greene and generously overlook or underplay Greene’s pride in 'my friend Fidel Castro,' his contribution to the Sandinistas in the hope his money would buy bullets, his defense of Kim Philby, the spy who betrayed Britain for Stalin’s Soviet Union, and much else of the sort. A similarly indulgent chapter sets up John le Carré, another outsider by nature, as heir to Greeneland, morbidly downbeat about the workings of democracy, capitalism, pharmaceutical companies, or whatever. As though they were like for like, le Carré repeatedly holds up the morality and efficacy of Soviet agents against their British counterparts ... Cold Warriors is a big and brash book at the heart of which is the surprise that all in all, even in these godforsaken times, the pen managed to remain mightier than the sword.

White’s selection of writers is revealing. By including Howard Fast, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, and Gioconda Belli, White seeks to be even-handed in his treatment of writers who opposed communism and those who were often critical of the United States and the West. There are murmurs of moral equivalency here that are unwarranted. The sufferings of literary dissidents under communism bear no comparison to writers who dissented from U.S. or Western policies during the Cold War. White seems to believe that writers who willingly served the interests of the United States during the Cold War were no different from writers who willingly served the interests of the Soviet state ... The best part of White’s book [are] the stories of writers such as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Havel, and others who courageously wrote and spoke the truth to power behind the iron curtain ... he gives too much credit to Gorbachev and not enough credit to Reagan, and no credit at all to Pope John Paul II who himself was a writer and intellectual of considerable merit. Indeed, it is arguable that John Paul II’s spoken and written words did more to bring down the iron curtain than any writer discussed by White.

... massive and enjoyable ... White presents a vivid, personality-driven chronicle of books going to war – and of writers finding themselves either caught up in the gears of international spycraft or acting as spies themselves ... In these pages, readers will encounter the writing of familiar figures, but in a completely different context ... serves up these stories with an unfailing dramatic flair, which makes for irresistible reading. In the battle over ideas, the pen is truly mightier than the sword.

White’s book, a 700-plus page exploration of how the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6) and the Kremlin weaponised literature from the 1930s until Glasnost, serves as a historical prologue to everything from Netflix’s The Great Hack to Peter Pomerantsev’s This is Not Propaganda. It may also grant some retrospective solace to the novelist or poet who despairs of literature’s declining role as a change agent in an age of memes replacing tomes. If nothing else, Cold Warriors testifies as to how seriously East and West once took books ... Cold Warriors is a surprisingly accessible and compulsive read, not least because of its cast list: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Boris Pasternak, Graham Greene, Anna Akhmatova, John le Carré, Mary McCarthy, Andrei Sinyavsky, Václav Havel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gioconda Belli and many more ... The cold war is a heavyweight subject, but Cold Warriors is a heavyweight book. History has rarely seemed as compelling, and as pertinent, as through the lens of White’s journey through this icy age.

...[a] fascinating new book on the role of literature in the Cold War ... White mostly writes in a neutral, functional prose, which is well-suited to deadpan comedy...but his style really comes into its own when dealing with more emotionally charged material ... As in all the best works of non-fiction, comedy and tragedy rub up against each other with wonderful inappropriateness ... Despite the book’s length, there are a few sections that seem hurried, all narrative and no colour ... One might conclude, then, that the book is too short rather than too long – it is certainly not inflated by waffle. It frequently grips like a thriller, even in the sections in which White is dealing with intellectual ideas rather than blackmail and violence. It will serve, too, to remind writers of how lucky they are to live in a free society – and perhaps induce a little nostalgia for the days when people thought they were worth shooting.

...[an] ambitious and constantly rewarding survey of writers who battled to get read in the Cold War ... [White's] research is impressive, presented in crisp, efficient prose with an eye for the encapsulating detail (e.g. Ho Chi Minh catching frostbite while queuing to pay homage to Lenin’s corpse). Even so, his parameters are a bit loosey-goosey. While prepared to bring Nicaragua into his sphere of interest, he strangely neglects to travel further south, most glaringly to Chile, where the CIA’s overthrow of the communist president Salvador Allende merits just half a paragraph ... That said, Cold Warriors fascinates in the areas it does choose to cover, and serves as a nostalgic reminder of a time when literature was a life-or-death matter.

As is the risk with any book trying to cover so much, Cold Warriors as a whole is uneven. It is at its strongest when charting the shifting communist sympathies of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Mary McCarthy, and others, but what connects all the authors mentioned is primarily that they were writing during the Cold War. Alone that is not enough to satisfyingly carry the narrative ... At times riveting and insightful, this book will appeal to readers of Cold War history and readers of espionage thrillers. However, because of its expansive scope, it is difficult to recommend to general readers.

... a massive, thoroughly researched history of the roles of writers and literature during the Cold War ... Many celebrated writers glimmer in these pages ... Many readers will be surprised by the connections among these writers, which White ably highlights ... Both profound and profoundly important and as engaging as a gripping Cold War thriller.