In 1952 Paul Gallico’s _Trial by Terror_ chronicled the ordeal of Jimmy Race, reporter for the Paris edition of the _Chicago Sentinel_. Slipping into Hungary to unearth the story behind the conviction and twenty-year sentence meted out to an American named Frobisher, Race is arrested. Brainwashed and tortured into a false confession at a propaganda trial, Race is sentenced to prison. When his release is eventually secured, he is a fear-ridden, completely disorganized personality, an animal conditioned to confession as completely as Pavlov’s dog was to salivation. But his destruction is not the only cause for anger. His liberation was not achieved by his government, but by his editor, who was able to blackmail the Hungarian Minister of Affairs because of Titoist activities. The feeling throughout the book is that the United States embassy played a diplomatic game in which the deadliest weapons were strongly worded notes. The final irony is that the release was accomplished by a private citizen forced to use Communist methods of blackmail and intimidation. This novel graphically indicts Soviet brutality. It also criticizes American policy in a dramatic aspect of the cold war. GREAT BRITAIN The English political novel appeared somewhat earlier than its American counterpart. Its subjects range over a wider area and its varieties of political experience are more numerous. As a political instrument, however, the English novel is very like the American. =Benjamin Disraeli: Revitalized Toryism= In the preface to the fifth edition of _Coningsby_, coming five years after first publication in 1844, Benjamin Disraeli, later Prime Minister and Earl of Beaconsfield, made no pretense about his intent: The main purpose of its writer was to vindicate the just claims of the Tory party to be the popular political confederation of the country.... It was not originally the intention of the writer to adopt the form of fiction as the instrument to scatter his suggestions, but, after reflection, he resolved to avail himself of a method which, in the temper of the times, offered the best chance of influencing opinion.