1) From Russia, With Love by Ian Fleming (1957)

The fifth and best of the James Bond novels sees 007 dodging assassination attempts by SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence agency. It’s straightforward West-good East-bad stuff, but a more nuanced book might not have found room for everybody’s favourite personification of Russian ruthlessness, the lesbian sadist Rosa Klebb, and her lethal shoes.

2) The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon (1959)

The plot of Condon’s satirical thriller is bonkers - the mother of a US war hero collaborates with the KGB to brainwash him into being an unwitting assassin. But with the American public whipped into frenzied paranoia about Reds under their beds, they proved highly receptive to the even more terrifying scenario of Reds inside their heads.

3) The Calculus Affair by Hergé (1956)

Not technically a novel, but this Tintin comic is no more cartoonish than most Cold War thrillers I’ve read, and is superbly plotted. Professor Calculus is kidnapped after he absent-mindedly invents a weapon of mass destruction, and Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock set off for the small Soviet satellite state of Borduria to rescue him.

4) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (1963)

For many people, mention the Berlin Wall and they think immediately of the heart-breaking ending of this thriller. Depicting spies on both sides of the Wall as “people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives,” it has a cynical power that sounded a new note in spy fiction and was never quite recaptured in le Carré’s later books.

5) Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

My favourite of Deighton’s novels about an unnamed secret agent (christened Harry Palmer in the film versions starring Michael Caine), here trying to prevent a Texan billionaire's meddling in the Eastern bloc from causing an all-out nuclear war. Close to parody, but underneath is a plausible vision of Britain as the conflict’s piggy-in-the-middle.

Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in Billion Dollar Brain (1967) Credit: Copyright (c) 1967 Rex Features. No use without permission./J. Barry Peake/REX Shutterstock

6) The Book of Daniel by EL Doctorow (1971)

A fictionalised version of the haunting true story of the American communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets. The novel is an indictment of the way America betrayed its own citizens in the name of suppressing treason.

7) The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider (1984)

Schneider’s genial but thoughtful novel examines the lives of a number of characters living on either side of the Wall in Eighties Berlin. Asking “Where does the state end and a self begin?”, Schneider celebrates those who try to overcome the psychological as well as the physical barriers imposed on them by the political situation.

8) The Innocent by Ian McEwan (1990)

A naive English engineer is divested of his political and sexual innocence in 1950s Berlin. Romantic entanglements are made to symbolise the complexity of geopolitical relations - or should that be the other way round? - more smoothly than in McEwan’s more recent take on the Cold War, Sweet Tooth.

9) Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

Described by Martin Amis as a “wake for the cold war”, DeLillo’s sprawling, decades-spanning epic both embodies and satirises nostalgia for the certainties of the era of Mutually Assured Destruction: “it held us together, the Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things. You could measure hope and you could measure destruction.”

10) Young Philby by Robert Littell (2012)

Ingeniously and teasingly filling in some of the lacunae in our knowledge of Kim Philby’s early life, this is a work to stand alongside Alan Bennett’s Single Spies plays. For 40 years Littell’s spy novels, often bordering on the surreal and farcical, have told us more about the Cold War mentality than most straight histories.

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