Books, Arts & Manners: The Petty Illusion

Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-46, by Hugh Thomas (Atheneum, 667 pp., $27.50)

Hugh Thomas’s immense history of “the beginnings of the cold war”—the first volume in a projected series—comes close to telling more about the years 1945-46 than most readers will want to know. Mr. Thomas’s theme is the gradual dawning upon Western leaders in 1946 that Josef Stalin was not really their friend— an illusion whose persistence, in the last months of World War II and during its aftermath, had enabled the Soviet dictator to consolidate power in Eastern Europe and come close to receiving atomic secrets as an open gift from the West.

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Samuel T. Francis

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-46, by Hugh Thomas (Atheneum, 667 pp., $27.50)

Hugh Thomas’s immense history of “the beginnings of the cold war”—the first volume in a projected series—comes close to telling more about the years 1945-46 than most readers will want to know. Mr. Thomas’s theme is the gradual dawning upon Western leaders in 1946 that Josef Stalin was not really their friend— an illusion whose persistence, in the last months of World War II and during its aftermath, had enabled the Soviet dictator to consolidate power in Eastern Europe and come close to receiving atomic secrets as an open gift from the West.