From Jackson Pollock to Jack Kerouac, the Cold War was a golden age for US popular culture and big ideas alike. Join Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand for a luminous new history.

Until the Second World War, American ideas and culture were viewed with scepticism even by Americans; but in its aftermath, the nation saw an extraordinary flourishing of art, literature, philosophy, movies and music that are still loved and celebrated in 2021.

Cross-pollinated with European thought and culture, from de Beauvoir to the Beatles, and inspired by artists and thinkers from across the Free World, including Mexico, the Caribbean and Japan, American culture came to be respected and adored.

Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand joins us to tell the story of how and why. This is not a history of “Cold War culture” or the “cultural Cold War” but an account of an exhilarating period of cultural change, with the battle of ideas between the Soviet Union and the US one dimension of an extraordinary tale.

It was a time of paranoia and persecution, of poverty and inequality, of coups, assassinations, and Mutually Assured Destruction: and a time when ideals of democracy, authenticity, and liberty mattered, and which infused movies, painting, poetry and music that continue to enrich our lives today.