Viscount Maugham, formerly the British Lord Chancellor, wrote these (partly mendacious) words in a pamphlet published in 1941 entitled Lies as allies: or Hitler at war. Hitler was happy to declare the usefulnes of deception as a means of achieving his ends and despite the availability of Mein Kampf in Britain at the time, Neville Chamberlain had believed the dictator's guarantees of peace in 1938. It makes sense to us now that an establishment pamphleteer would want to represent Hitler's ‘praises of lying’ as anathema to ’Britishness’ and propagate the falsehood that, in contrast to Hitler, British statesmen had never used mendacity as an instrument of war. But Maugham's propaganda, whilst unsurprising, underscores some important points which I will be making in this chapter. Firstly, Maugham mobilises the ideology of ‘national character’ in his argument. Regardless of the realities of British military and political history, he is able to represent Great Britain as a nation committed to ‘Truth’. Secondly, Maugham's contrast between Hitler and ‘Britishness’ draws its persuasive force from a premise that was essentially true from a British point of view: Hitler had praised lying in his writings and he had proved himself a liar on the international stage.