Christopher Hill's Peace and Power in Cold War Britain seeks to investigate the relationship between the British mass media, especially television, and social movements from the end of the Second World War to the time of the anti-Vietnam War and student protests around 1968. It uses the protests against nuclear weapons in Britain, and especially their representation on television, to investigate a highly relevant question: “how [the] radical right of participation has been conditioned and enabled by the transformations in communications media” (1). His study is based on a diverse range of relevant archives, including the National Archives in Kew, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament papers at the London School of Economics, the Trades Union Congress papers at Warwick, the Independent Television Authority Archive at Bournemouth, the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, and the J. B. Priestley Library at Bradford, to name but the most important ones. It also considers reporting in the national press.

Hill has arranged his study thematically. He looks from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and related groups, such as the Direct Action Committee and the Committee of 100, outwards and introduces us to a number of issues that relate to its campaigning and the media. His first chapter probes the social and political context of the use of the mass media by social movement; the second discusses the role of information for movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Other chapters explore the role of public intellectuals, “the street as a medium,” the debates about political communications within the Labour Party, and the trades union movement, as well as ways in which discussions about the protests against nuclear weapons led to a discourse about law and order. The final chapter provides a short overview of the anti-Vietnam and student protests around 1968 as the coda for the developments described in the book. Each of these chapters can be read individually as snapshots into how engagement with the mass media and mainly television framed the ways in which political activists engaged—and how they were framed, in turn, by the press and television.

The study has much to recommend it: it tackles an important question and offers a post-1945 equivalent to Helen McCarthy's British People and the League of Nations (2011). The chapters on public intellectuals (with its excellent sections on educational broadcasting, satire, and documentaries) and on debates about political communications in the Labour Party and the trade unions are especially noteworthy: they skillfully blend governmental and organizational perspectives with an analysis of media dynamics.

However, some material covered in the book (especially in chapters 1, 2, and 4, which follow the structure of other recent studies) seems less fresh and covers more familiar ground. Hill is primarily interested in the functionalist forms of the relationship between movement and mass media. It is perhaps because of this methodological choice that the interesting topic of movement media and their aesthetic and cultural connections to more mainstream media are not systematically discussed. Hill's excellent point about the “dramatization of science” (99) is not fully elaborated—we only hear about the ways in which the interests of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the BBC on educating the public converged.

More generally, the book seems unable to decide whether it wants to focus on the analysis of the media's coverage of political representation or on a study of activism in the context of media reporting. Thus, the anti-nuclear-weapons movements’ “regimes of representation” appear as attempts “to window dress the movement” but were “largely unenforceable” (125). On other occasions, Hill evaluates media reports against what he makes out to be the reality on the ground, a reality the study is unable to cover fully because of its chosen focus on media as opposed to movement sources. And is it even meaningful to measure the media against “how it really was” (Leopold von Ranke) or is it not, as Hill seems to suggest elsewhere in the book, more productive to analyze the mass media's framing of things as partly constitutive of experienced reality?

Because of this methodological ambivalence, the specific nature of democracy and political representation, and how these were challenged and transformed by mediated movement activism in the 1950s and 1960s, remain a bit vague. Hill is right in arguing that the debates had the potential to shake the legitimacy of the British state at its foundation (77). But there is little sustained and systematic discussion about how this challenge played out, what ideas it brought to light, or the dynamics to which it gave rise. Ultimately, Hill's book provides a careful rephrasing of earlier interpretations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—and even to some extent of the more radical Direct Action Committee and Committee of 100—as geared towards “a constructive engagement with news frames and values” (246). By contrast, Hill argues that the protests around 1968 were “antagonistic” and revolved around “issues that were personal and social,” leading to a rise of “identity politics,” thus undermining “the single issue movement as a form of mass mobilization in Cold War Britain” (246).

Overall, then, readers who had expected to find an analysis of “the movement and media as interacting systems,” to use Bill Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld's phrase, could therefore be disappointed. Hill argues that there is a “connectedness of movements and the state” with the “mass media as intermediaries” (49), but this intriguing point is not really elaborated much throughout the study. Overall, though, these points for discussion only go to show that this study makes a significant contribution towards a fuller understanding of the relationship between the mass media and political representation in Cold War Britain.