Pound by Pound

“Whilst on the subject of propaganda, we must refer, in parentheses, to the
slimiest of Hebrews, Victor Gollancz, who with his Left Book Club and his publishing
house, did as much for the cause of war as the Ostrers with their poisonous “news-
films.” – Twilight Over England (pg.69)

Victor Gollancz (1893-1967)

Gollancz formed his own publishing company in 1927, publishing works by writers such as Ford Madox Ford and George Orwell (though Orwell went to Secker and Warburg from Homage to Catalonia on). While Gollancz published The Red Army Moves by Geoffrey Cox on the Winter War in 1941, he omitted some criticisms of the USSR.

Gollancz was one of the founders of the Left Book Club. He had a knack for marketing, sometimes taking out full-page newspaper adverts for the books he published, a novelty at the time. He also used eye-catching typography and book designs, and used yellow dust-covers on books.

In addition to his highly successful publishing business, Gollancz was a prolific writer on a variety of subjects, and put his ideas into action by establishing campaigning groups. His 1943 pamphlet ‘Let My People Go’, which called for an attempt by the Allied powers to rescue Jews under threat of extermination in occupied Europe, reached a mass audience in 1943, following widespread coverage in the British media in December 1942 of the Nazi’s extermination policy. A subsequent pamphlet, published by Gollancz later on in the war, failed to reach a mass audience. By then the British media had almost entirely ceased coverage of the story of the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jewry, after it had become clear that the western powers were unwilling to respond to popular British sentiment at the end of 1942 and early 1943 in favour of an attempt to rescue Jews in occupied Europe, which would have meant siphoning resources from the war effort. Along with Eleanor Rathbone, Gollancz was the the foremost British campaigner during the Second World War on the issue of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. – Wikipedia

Maxim Litvinov

When the Russian government began arresting Bolsheviks in 1906, Litvinov left the country and spent the next ten years living in London, where he was active in the International Socialist Bureau. In early 1918, he was frequently reported in the British and American press as the foreign representative of the Bolsheviks in the UK,^[3] a claim given some substance by R. H. Bruce Lockhart, a British agent in Moscow at the time.^[4] In England he met and married Ivy Lowe, daughter of one of the most distinguished Jewish families in Britain. Miss Lowe’s ancestors emigrated from Hungary to England following the unsuccessful 1848 revolution. Her father, Walter Lowe, was a prominent writer and a close friend of H.G. Wells. They enjoyed fre­quent exchanges, Lowe espousing the Jewish point of view, and Wells a secular philosophy. -Wikipedia

John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir

With the outbreak of the First World War, Buchan went to write for the British War Propaganda Bureau, and worked as a correspondent in France for The Times. He continued to write fiction, however, and in 1915 published his most famous work: The Thirty-Nine Steps, a spy-thriller set just prior to World War I. The novel featured Buchan’s oft used hero, Richard Hannay, which was a character based on Edmund Ironside, a fellow who had been a friend of Buchan from the latter’s days in South Africa. – Wikipedia