How to Win an Information War

BY THE AUTHOR OF NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE



'Lively and elegant.' TLS

'History at its most urgent.' BEN JUDAH

'An essential read.' MAIL ON SUNDAY

From one of our leading experts on disinformation, the incredible true story of the complex and largely forgotten WWII propagandist Sefton Delmer - and what we can learn from him today.



Summer 1941, Hitler and his allies rule Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. But inside Germany, there is a notable voice of dissent, Der Chef, whose radio broadcasts skilfully question Nazi doctrine. What listeners don't know is that Der Chef is a fiction, a character created by the British propagandist Sefton Delmer.



As Peter Pomerantsev uncovers Delmer's fascinating lost story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the global response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine.



Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies contemporary propaganda and how to defeat it. His first book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 RSL Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, Pushkin Prize, Baillie Gifford Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. His second, This is Not Propaganda, won the 2020 Gordon Burn Prize. His essay on authoritarian propaganda, 'Memory in the Age of Impunity', won the 2022 European Press Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.