propaganda

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

Propaganda from the Russian Front: The People Immortal, by Vasily Grossman, reviewed

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…

Lord Northcliffe’s war of words

30 July 2022 9:00 am

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

Putin’s mistake was to discard the velvet glove

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…

Why more and more Russians are backing the war

23 April 2022 9:00 am

Why Russian support for the war will keep growing

What TV is telling Russians – and why they believe it

26 March 2022 9:00 am

What Russians watch — and believe

Russian memoirs are prone to a particular form of angst

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…

Cambridge University is kowtowing to China

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

Joseph Goebbels: Hitler’s ‘little doctor’ was devoted unto death

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’

How independence will impoverish Scottish culture

13 September 2014 9:00 am

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

Vladimir Putin’s empire of lies

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’

When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door

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…

Sochi Olympics: Why picking on gays has backfired so horribly for Vladimir Putin

1 February 2014 9:00 am

Russia’s thuggish President has picked on the wrong minority