elying our reverence for fair play, the British have always excelled at covert operations. In the last war we trained a small army of gifted amateurs for all the dirtiest tricks, from lying, bugging, forging and embezzlement to necessary murder. In the vanguard of the information war was Sefton Delmer (1904-1979), a Rabelaisian figure, fluent in German, whose speciality was the blackest of black propaganda. (Faber & Faber, 304PP, £20) Peter Pomerantsev, himself an expert on contemporary
