American journalist Edward Hunter of The Miami Daily News was in Hong Kong in the late 1940s interviewing former communist prisoners who had been 're-educated'. Hunter decided that China had come up with a way to change what people thought. This superficially successful punishment- and-reward process was called xi nao, or 'mind cleanse'. For his 1950 story, Hunter invented a snappier word: brainwash. And suddenly, evidence of brainwashing was everywhere and explained everything. The powerless victim, Hunter said, became 'a living puppet - a human robot'. Dominic Streatfeild, writer and documentary-maker, deals with all this and more in his superb Brainwash, which examines how deluded US and British agencies, convinced that China and Russia had cracked the secret of mind control, tried to turn fantasy into fact. Communism, after all, was 'a sinister mental state incompatible with free thought'. They tried truth drugs, hypnosis, electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), sleep deprivation, even Chinese opera, leaving a trail of damaged human subjects in their wake. Streatfeild is a gifted storyteller, deftly separating the laughable (subliminal messages) from the tragic (ECT erases specific memories, and everything else).