'Fascinating and challenging' John Carey
The secrets of a love-hate relationship steeped in mutual admiration, blood and propaganda . . .
In August 1914 Britains first act of war was not to mobilise its army or the Grand Fleet. It was to cut cables, preventing German propaganda from reaching American newspapers. This war of words would quickly become as vicious as the slaughter on the Western Front.
For the best part of a century, Britain and Germany had been closer than any other two countries. Germany was Britains biggest export market, and vice versa. Germans adopted English dress, customs and manners. German thinking on race, national identity, eugenics and racial supremacy also had its roots in British thinkers like Darwin, Huxley and Galton. Even as late as the Nazi era, Hess, Himmler, Goering and Hitler himself remained passionate Anglophiles.
During the First World War, however, Germany and Britain spent billions on clandestine propaganda to blacken each others reputations. This gargantuan effort gave birth to the PR industry itself later seized upon by Nazi propagandist Goebbels to devastating effect.
Richard Miltons expertly written popular history gives a fresh perspective on this tumultuous and painful national rivalry, and is also a brilliant study of propaganda itself now more than ever a vital weapon of war.
Richard Milton is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who has also worked as a PR consultant for many large corporations. He is a principal presenter for The PR Training Centre in London and has guest lectured in PR and Journalism at Buckingham University. He is the author of Bad Company (Stratus Books, 2001), chosen by the Sunday Times as its Book of the Week. His other books include The Facts of Life (Fourth Estate, 1992) and Forbidden Science (Fourth Estate, 1994) and a novel, Dead Secret (Stratus Books, 2000).
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