For most of its fifty-year span, the Cold War and its tensions were the dominating fact of world history; today it is over, and whatever the future brings, it will be different. This timely Companion is a guide to the whole course of East/West relations, in all their manifestations, from the Grand Alliance of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Concise and intensely practical, the book sets all the major characters, conflicts, crises and conferences in their full international context.