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Political leaders rely upon particular individuals or party organisations to reach potential constituencies, but they can only guess at the probable effect any agent has on those electors. For politicians anxious to seize and hold power, it is very good news when one of their partisans establishes and maintains a faithful following. The complexities of understanding influence, especially in the 20th century, are compounded by the difficulties of identifying the myriad interests expressed in a variety of contending forums as well as at the polls. While archives of printed, spoken, and viewed materials allow us to recover what political figures said to various audiences, it is very difficult to demonstrate that expressed ideas actually affected political thinking or political conduct. It is a further speculative leap to imagine what audiences actually heard, what they wanted to hear, and what they made of what they believed they heard. In a written or spoken or pictorial effort to transmit ideas, the intention and purpose may be stated explicitly but the contents of the ideas may still be equivocal. Different kinds of audiences and different members of the same audience will find a variety of meanings, often contradictory, in what they read, hear, or see. Arthur Bryant, a popular historian, journalist, and polemicist was remarkably successful in proclaiming the merits of a pragmatic and ideological conservatism to a multiplicity of large, loyal audiences through the end of the Second World War. This essay examines Bryant's remarkable audience in the Illustrated London News and the ways in which he engaged and retained them for nearly 50 years.
