E.H. Gombrich, the great art historian, worked at the BBC during the war, analysing German wartime propaganda. In a lecture after the war he explained that what made it effective was ‘less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events’. Pathological dualism creates a self-contained world which becomes self-confirming. ‘Once you are entrapped in this illusionary universe it will become reality for you,
