I'd like to think I'm politically aware, with well considered views. As a student I was at the Sorbonne during the May riots of 68, I protested in Grosvenor Square about American foreign policy and I've followed political change,with interest, over some 50 years. But in latter years, I've become increasingly disenchanted and now find it difficult to engage with any political party. With that as my starting point, I found this book a concise, informed and objective analysis of the current mess of political garbage.

I'm increasingly frustrated by mainstream media reporting. There's little fact, a lot of opinion, much of which is ill informed and inaccurate, and there's no substance to any of the political parties. Once upon a time, a labour voter was distinct from and very different to a Tory. Both had clear ideals, values and aspirations. The electorate could look at a manifesto and determine the extent to which a personal view accorded with party politics and vote accordingly. But something went horribly wrong; after years of Thatcherism, a Blair regime offered little difference. Hubris replaced political commitment and that's further degenerated to politics by buzzword. I'm sick of Brexit; in the 1970s, entry to the Common Market was one of numerous political issues. There was a referendum, people voted to join and the result was accepted. Domestic politics then took precedence and political parties had clear policy on law reform, trades Union, nationalisation, social care, benefits funding, taxation, defence spending etc.

Now, we seem to be ruled by social media 'trends' and horribly biased reporting by both broadsheet and red tops. It's difficult to find truth and fact, which should be the currency, rather than the hyperbole of ill informed opinion. But a brain dead mass fed a daily Kyle diet is happily accepting of any pap pumped in their direction. They can only assimilate sentences of two words and then only when force fed. I'm no academic, and I've no axe to grind, but I found the text thought provoking and objective.

This book explores a raft of issues in eloquent detail and it's one of the best non fiction titles I've read in a while.

My thanks to ebury for a review copy via Netgalley.

An interesting and probing analysis about the use of media, especially social media. My only argument would be that post truth has been around for longer than 12 months.

Fake news. Alternative facts. Post truth. Three terms to strike a chill into the heart. Despite the concept of 'post truth' having only really burst into our cultural consciousness within the past year or so, over the scant 176 pages of his book, Matthew D'Ancona makes it clear that we have been headed this way for a while. Former editor of The Spectator, D'Ancona is a journalist with a formidable CV. Unusually for me, I had mixed feelings on whether I would want to actually pick this up (on the one hand, I like to be informed but on the other, I have found most of the major news stories over the past year unutterably depressing) but reading the accompanying Guardian article on key 'post-truth' terms, I decided to put my faith in D'Ancona to explain the topic without making me want to move to a small Hebridean island and remove myself from the Internet forever. While there are times when Post Truth does feel a little like diving into an unheated swimming pool, D'Ancona manages to be both engaging and informative whilst also having practical solutions for how best we can move forward. One of the more necessary reads of our times, D'Ancona's book is a handbook for survival and a well-written one at that.

Myself, I have always been something of a stickler. I can absolutely kill an anecdote by adding too much detail - I struggle to refer to a person within a story as a 'friend' rather than offering the more precise and accurate note of 'my third-cousin-once-removed' or 'my next-door-neighbour's niece's husband'. Even more irritatingly, as a child, if I heard other people using the same verbal short-hand, I would immediately feel the urge to correct them, unable to stomach the untruth. This is not a way to make or indeed keep friends. Also unhelpful was that while in sixth form, I read virtually the entirety of Snopes and could chirpily debunk a lot of the hilarious or terrifying news items which tended to pop up in people's inboxes in the early 2000s. Facts are not fun. They spoil a good story. People prefer to believe in the untruth, it is more emotionally satisfying. However, D'Ancona explains that the way that this 'emotional necessity trumps strict adherence to the truth' is what has got us to where we are now.

Unsurprisingly, D'Ancona cites his sources with great care throughout. The stories pumped around the world to discredit Hilary Clinton, the 350 million that was never going to go to the NHS instead, the dossier that was either beefed-up, sexed-up or the rantings of a taxi driver - these are all stories which we know to be false but which have caused little or no harm to those who originally peddled the lies. D'Ancona cites one of George W Bush's aides who told a New York Times journalist that his approach was lamentably outdated since being in the 'reality-based community' is not the way the world works any more. And while people still concerned with truth are studying reality, those such as George W Bush's administration were ready to 'act again, creating other new realities'. We see this every day. It is impossible to keep up with.

D'Ancona charts the loss of faith from 2008, when the financial crisis hit but while those on the bottom rungs of society might suffer, it became clear that the big corporations would not be allowed to fail. Those at the top would never pay the piper but they would call the tune. Then there was the MP expenses scandal, causing people to lose faith in our elected representatives. Then came the phone-hacking saga which undermined our faith in the media. Then Operation Yewtree, which showed that not only were big corporations such as the BBC turning a blind eye to unspeakable crimes but so many of the nation's most celebrated entertainers were not who they appeared to be. So we lost faith. We stopped believing. We no longer trusted 'experts'.

D'Ancona keeps the detached tone of the observer but as he chronicles the bizarre presidential campaign and subsequent victory of Mr Donald Trump, he finds it difficult to hide the extent to which he is, like the rest of us, both baffled and appalled. Breaking the garble that has come out of the Orange One down to its components, D'Ancona notes how Trump can argue that 'sources of the stories are authentic - bt the reports were nonetheless fake. Truly, we [are] through the looking glass'. Still, this is not really a book about Trump, but rather how we and those around us perceive the world. As D'Ancona observes, Trump is the symptom rather than the cause and post-truthism will not be cured when he leaves office, whenever that is.

There are certain issues raised by the book however which are particularly alarming. The fact that Alex Jones, the right-wing host of Infowars, is known to be in contact with Donald Trump disturbed me deeply. This is the man who purports to believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was faked and that the Clintons are involved in Satanic child abuse. I found it alarming too that in 2005, the American Museum of National History was unable to secure corporate sponsorship for its exhibition on Darwin because all the companies approached feared a backlash from creationists. By contrast, in 2007, a 27 million dollar creationist museum was built in Kentucky, with bumper stickers sold there stating 'We're Taking Dinosaurs Back'. As in, returning them. Because you can change scientific history if you don't like it. It reminds me of a university debate I attended at around the same time, 'This House Prefers Darwin to God', where a girl stood up and said that she was 'not happy' to be descended from a chimp and so she would be voting against the motion. Another girl stood up and said that the previous year she had been 'not happy' about having a 9am class, that she was currently 'not happy' about George W Bush being the president of her country, but that the simple fact of being 'not happy' about something cannot make it untrue.

I find myself wondering too at the selfishness of the attitude behind a lot of this - it is as if a truth which is unpalatable can simply be repackaged. I remember a woman around the 2010 election complaining on the news about how the results had not reflected her vote, and that had she been in a restaurant and been served chocolate cake when she had ordered cheesecake, something would be done about it. Have we become so self-absorbed that we can no longer accept a majority decision, or, far worse, a compromise? D'Ancona suggests that the American election result, and by extension the Brexit result, was the product of a disenfranchised, disillusioned populace sending the biggest 'F***k You' to their government in history. How have we got to the point where people are so willing to go against the facts and hurt their own prospects out of such pointless spite? Have we become such children that we sigh heavily during the boring facts about how far Britain's GDP will dip under Brexit and that most households will be around £300 worse off per year, and just giggle away at funny Mr Farage with his pint? Has our attention span become so microscopic?

Still, anyone could write a searing take-down of reasons why truth, facts and indeed reality have come under threat. What makes D'Ancona's book worth reading is that it is not just an analysis of the situation, but also an attempt to offer a solution. Post Truth is a piece of political advocacy, independent of specific political affiliation, with the final chapter entitled 'The Stench of Lies: Strategies to Defeat Post Truth'. I remember being struck back in my teaching days by the way in which children struggled to discern the differences between reliable and unreliable sources on the Internet. On one particular occasion, an ICT lesson returned three different answers for the question 'When was Churchill born?' As D'Ancona explains, this needs to be a key part of education. He points out that we save time in that answers can be found in our fingertips whereas for most of my school days I had to trawl through books. However, there is a balance to this - we need to add in time for fact-checking. This takes patience, but it needs to become embedded, with D'Ancona rightly observing, 'Learning how to navigate the web with discernment is the most pressing cultural missing of our age'.

Ending with 'Reasons to be Cheerful', Post Truth is an upbeat read, reminding us that all is not lost and trying to point out areas of recovery. Kellyanne Conway's exhortation to believe in 'alternative facts' sent Nineteen Eighty Four rocketing up the bestseller lists. Satire too can expose weakness and raise awareness. Deborah Lipstadt did not lose her case against David Irving and the recent film Denial reignites that point. There are 'science' celebrities such as Professor Brian Cox who can help make facts 'sexy' again (if they ever were). Still, I came away feeling afraid, fretting over the ever shrinking news cycle and goldfish memory that the media seems to assume we have - if they have to get the story out before we lose interest, there is no time for 'research' and due diligence, which leaves us with something that feels true but may not be. Post truth.

In November 2012, Mark Thompson, the former Director General of the BBC, delivered, as part of his Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at Oxford University, a series of three lectures there entitled ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’.

The theme of Thompson’s lectures was the degeneration of public discourse and particularly of political language in contemporary democratic politics, with the latter becoming more effective as an instrument of political persuasion but less effective as a medium of explanation and deliberation. To illustrate the way in which public language is increasingly prone to exaggeration and paranoia, Thompson examined in some detail Sarah Palin’s reference to Obamacare’s alleged ‘death panels’ (which d’Ancona also references). Thompson’s insights (later worked up into his 2016 book ‘Enough Said. What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics’) were extremely prescient.

Since 2012, the phenomenon of post-truth expression, and particularly Fake News, has become a mainstream concern given the misrepresentations of the EU referendum campaign and, above all, the election of Trump as 45th President of the United States. There has accordingly been a flurry of books on the subject.

Matthew d’Ancona’s ‘Post-Truth’ is part of that trend but he, like Thompson, views the perversion of public discourse in its fullest context considering, like Thompson in his original lectures, topics such as the disavowal of climate change science, and he is also, like Thompson, not content merely to analyze what has happened but goes on to suggest ways in which the situation might be retrieved, d’Ancona’s book being subtitled ‘The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back’. Incidentally, whilst d’Ancona’s fairly brief book is amply footnoted it does not contain a bibliography, and there is no reference anywhere in the text to Mark Thompson’s pioneering work.

D’Ancona’s mission is threefold: to expose the roots of our Post-Truth era; to diagnose its symptoms; and to offer a cure.

When tracing the origins of the Post-Truth era d’Ancona ranges broadly, examining the post-modernists’ corrosion of the notion of objective reality, the role of the internet and the erosion of trust in a variety of institutions as a result of events including the 2008 banking crisis, the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal, the revelations regarding Jimmy Savile, and the hacking controversy. A more comprehensive account could also have included references to the findings of the Saville, Chilcot and Hillsborough inquiries, or at least to the doubts which were ultimately vindicated by their reports.

These are not d’Ancona’s only omissions. The EU referendum and Trump’s election but not Corbyn’s election as Labour leader are presented as marking “an uprising against the established order and a demand for ill-defined change” which “overturned the blithe predictions of pundits, pollsters and bookies”, and we’re told that the Leave campaign “triumphed with slogans that were demonstrably untrue or misleading” whilst no mention is made of George Osborne’s “punishment Budget” or “DIY recession”. In addition, if d’Ancona wanted to trace popular disenchantment with the predictive power of experts he should have mentioned their dire but unfulfilled prognostications regarding the Y2K or Millennium bug.

D’Ancona realizes that Trump is a symptom rather the cause of Post-Truth but still manages to skewer his serial mendacity with all the delight of a lepidopterist pinning some particularly prized possession. Thus Trump is “a soiled Gatsby” with a talent for emotional narrative, who is essentially an entertainer, who has successfully “recast the presidency as the most desirable role in show business.”

Rather than making Donald Trump or Alexander Dugin or Nigel Farage his chief villain, d’Ancona somewhat surprisingly casts Sigmund Freud in that role, on the grounds that the paradigm of therapy, which prizes emotional sincerity above forensically established objective fact, “has spread far beyond” its original “clinical setting, to assume a dominant role in contemporary culture and mores.”

I seriously doubt whether Freudianism has percolated through society as fully as d’Ancona imagines. I would suggest, for example, that however much many of those who supported Brexit or voted for Trump may be willing to blame immigrants for society’s ills they will always hold an individual to blame if faced with a choice between doing that or blaming that individual’s parents or society at large.

D’Ancona suggestions for defending respect for the truth against the “plutocratic, political and algorithmic firepower” of the Post-Truth stakeholders are varied and plausible and his call to the barricades genuinely rousing, although his faith in satirists to “act as picadors in the fight against Post-Truth” is almost certainly over optimistic. As Peter Cook was fond of pointing out, Weimar Berlin had the world’s most sophisticated political cabaret but that did nothing to stem the rising tide of fascism.

In the final analysis, setting aside all the shortcomings outlined above, this is a well-written, wide-ranging, informative and thought-provoking book which will be very appealing to those who share its author’s wish “to defend Enlightenment values.” I just wonder if, considering the persistence of religious values, the advent of ersatz religions such as Marxism and fascism and of pseudo-sciences like Freudianism, or even the enormous popularity of activities like gambling, rationalism has ever been quite as firmly entrenched as he assumes.