A wartime Minister of Information is compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.

Cockburn was attacked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1938). In 1936 Harry Pollitt General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain asked him to cover the Spanish Civil War. He was the second cousin once removed of novelists Alec Waugh and Evelyn Waugh.

: /ˈkoʊbərn/ KOH-bərn; 12 April 1904 – 15 December 1981) was a British journalist. He was a well known proponent of communism. His saying "believe nothing until it has been officially denied" is widely quoted in journalistic studies.