Book excerpt: The cultural history of the Cold War has been characterized as an explosion of fear and paranoia, based on very little actual intelligence. Both the US and Soviet administrations have since remarked how far off the mark their predictions of the other's strengths and aims were. Yet so much of the cultural output of the period – in television, film, and literature – was concerned with the end of the world. Here, Nicholas Barnett looks at art and design, opinion polls, the Mass Observation movement, popular fiction and newspapers to show how exactly British people felt about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In uncovering new primary source material, Barnett shows exactly how this seeped in to the art, literature, music and design of the period.