It's odd that Caute overlooks the fact that the Cold War wasn't all that cold. There's nothing on either the Korean War, Malaya, Cuba or the American edition of the Vietnam War (though we do get Graham Greene's The Quiet American), and his register on the Cold War is quite lofty. I'd contend that many of the most interesting novels about the true Cold War era were the offerings in science fiction where man fights alien invaders, for instance, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (destroyed on celluloid by Hollywood liberals and Paul Verhoeven) or The Puppet Masters (later ripped off by Jack Finney in The Body Snatchers) with its eccentric combination of McCarthyite paranoia and proto-hippy nudism.

An academic study shouldn't be too concerned about readership, but the other thought that occurred to me is: how much interest is there nowadays in many of the writers Caute examines? I can't remember the last time I caught anyone reading Dos Passos, Malraux or Sartre (the last time I did was the same time I was — the Seventies) and I doubt those who are reading Norman Mailer are reading the drivelly Armies of the Night. Even the most contemporary of writers cited, E. L. Doctorow and Robert Coover (for their assessment of the executed Rosenbergs), are somewhat faded figures. Camus and Kafka, of the writers Caute covers, I'd argue, are the ones going strongest, and they are the least "political".

The major failing of the Left in the 20th century, everywhere, was that it couldn't come to terms with the fact that it was wrong, completely, utterly, unpardonably wrong, about their exemplars, their paragons, the communist regimes that came to power in the Soviet Union, Red China, Vietnam and Cambodia, and that whatever the shortcomings and warts of "capitalism" and the West, the capitalist countries were a paradise in comparison to the countries that actually claimed to be workers' paradises. And in every case, the damning evidence was there from the beginning — it was just ignored.

Caute's strength seems to be Soviet literature, though he overlooks the generation just below Solzhenitsyn who also went into exile, interesting writers like Limonov and Dovlatov. The Spanish-speaking world and Africa are somewhat cheekily dismissed with a sentence at the very end about political fiction "resurfacing" there. Plenty is missing, but what Caute has evaluated is well done.