propaganda

Consorting with the enemy: The Propagandist, by Cécile Desprairies, reviewed

17 May 2025 9:00 am

The debut novel by a historian of the Vichy regime is a personal J’Accuse, indicting the collaborators in her family for their part in France’s collapse in the second world war

Four dangerous visionary writers

17 February 2024 9:00 am

Simon Ings examines the lives of Maxim Gorky, Maurice Barrès, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ding Ling, whose propagandism helped shape – and misshape – the 20th century

Men under fire

13 August 2022 9:00 am

On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…

Alfred the Great

30 July 2022 9:00 am

Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint

Wolves in sheep’s clothing

9 July 2022 9:00 am

To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature…

Conflict of opinion

23 April 2022 9:00 am

Why Russian support for the war will keep growing

Screen off

26 March 2022 9:00 am

What Russians watch — and believe

History endlessly repeated

29 May 2021 9:00 am

Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and…

The Spectator’s Notes

23 May 2020 9:00 am

Last month, writing elsewhere, I quoted the website of the China Centre at Jesus College, Cambridge: ‘Under the leadership of…

The beauty of Soviet anti-religious propaganda

19 October 2019 9:00 am

Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead…

The assassination attempt on Napoleon, in the Rue Saint-Nicaise, Christmas Eve 1800

The history of Britain’s secret war on Napoleon is astonishing, inspiring and disturbing

22 September 2018 9:00 am

Laws and sausages, we know, are better not seen in the making; and neither are ‘black ops’. Waterloo may have…

‘Soviet Union Art Exhibition’, Zurich 1931, by Valentina Kulagina

The art of persuasion

28 October 2017 9:00 am

It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this…

Hitler with the Goebbels family in the late 1930s

The devil’s devoted disciple

9 May 2015 9:00 am

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day…

Ellie Harrison’s cannons — poised to usher in a ‘Socialist Republic of Scotland’

Independence will lead to artistic ‘desecration’

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Daniel Jackson foresees an impoverished cultural landscape for an independentScotland, with artists forced to do Salmond’s bidding

Empire of deceit

26 July 2014 9:00 am

Putin’s answer to the destruction of Flight MH17 has been more propaganda. In Russia, at least, it seems to be working

The NHS ‘wellbeing’ monkey deserves to die

19 July 2014 9:00 am

My young daughter has a furry beaver — lifelike in all but its eyes, which to me seem cold and dead.…

Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon survive the Blitz in Mrs Miniver (1942).Churchill reckoned it was ‘worth six war divisions’ and Goebbels considered it an ‘exemplary propaganda film’, but to Lillian Hellman it was‘a piece of junk’

Directing the war effort

29 March 2014 9:00 am

John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to…

Putin’s pink peril

1 February 2014 9:00 am

Russia’s thuggish President has picked on the wrong minority