Information at War: A Communication History of the Ministry of Information 1939-1946

Simon Eliot is Professor Emeritus of the History of the Book, IES, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is co-founder and served as second president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. He is the author of over fifty articles and of Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800-1919 (1994); co-editor of Publishers' Circular/English Catalogue 1837-1900 (1988), Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007), The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book (2007, 2019), Allied Communication to the Public during the Second World War (2020); and general editor of The History of Oxford University Press (four volumes, 2013-17).

Henry Irving is a Senior Lecturer in Public History at Leeds Beckett University. He has worked on the project 'A Communication History of the Ministry of Information' since 2014. Henry specialises in the MoI's work on the 'home front'. His research has been published in leading journals, including the English Historical Review and Historical Research, and collections, most recently The Routledge Handbook of Information History (2025). His research has also been felt in the classroom, where his students often find themselves asked to censor a newspaper report or devise a publicity campaign. Henry is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and has held a British Academy Innovation Fellowship to apply his knowledge of wartime publicity to the promotion of the circular economy. Information at War is his first book.