Book excerpt: This book traces the origins and early development of what are today loosely termed Britain's Overseas Information Services. It examines how, at the end of the First World War, the British government came to forfeit the considerable lead it had established in propaganda since 1914, and the reasons why it had gradually to re-enter the field during the inter-war years as a direct response to totalitarianism. It surveys the pioneering work of the Foreign Office News Department and its important press office, the commercial propaganda conducted by the Empire Marketing Board and the Travel Association, the foundation and rapid peacetime growth of the British Council to conduct 'cultural diplomacy', and the beginning of the BBC's World Service with the inauguration of foreign-language broadcasts in 1938.