An evening with Charlie English

Join Charlie English, as he tells the astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

For almost fifty years after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, which stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the Black Sea. No physical combat would take place along this frontier, instead, the conflict would be fought in the psychological sphere.

No one understood this more clearly than George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA books programme’, which aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s global CIA ‘book club’ would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc, written by a vast and eclectic list of authors, including Hannah Arendt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and Agatha Christie. Volumes were smuggled via various intrepred means, then once inside the Soviet bloc, each book would circulate secretly among dozens of like-minded readers, quietly turning them into dissidents. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.

This is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free.