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British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus Tony Shaw London: I.B. Tauris, 2000, £39.50 ISBN 1-860644-371-X

Tom Easton

Tony Shaw's well-researched study adds another important piece in the jigsaw that is helping us make sense of the impact of the Cold War on British politics and culture. He is well versed in the intricacies of the Information Research Department, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other agencies of the formal apparatus of Cold War propaganda and combines this with a detailed, analytical knowledge of the British and US film industries.

The author has a fascinating chapter on the screening of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984. He concludes:

'The fact that Orwell's name was so strongly associated with propaganda makes the use to which Animal Farm and 1984 were put by filmmakers richly ironic. That both novels needed to be so heavily distorted illustrates Orwell's ideological distance from Western Cold War orthodoxy.'

Shaw draws widely on both contemporary assessments of new films and subsequent evaluations by participants and scholars. Information not easily incorporated into the main body of the text is helpfully appended in more than 50 pages of footnotes. The bibliography is extensive and there are useful film and general indices.

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