So PR from the 1920s on knew all the tricks of advertising, and had fewer hang-ups about practising them. But fundamental to it all, I think, was a bigger notion: that public opinion, culture, the world of meanings that we share, is not absolute but always there to be influenced – and that if you don’t influence it yourself, others will.

The first axiom is: it is impossible not to communicate. In other words, we don’t just communicate when we choose to speak or send out a message; in fact, we don’t only communicate when we intend to communicate. You can see the truth of this if you consider, for example, how you might interpret someone else’s failure to return a phone call –

And while we’ve been taught to think exclusively about the idea of the ‘proposition’, we’ve largely forgotten that we could often more usefully think in terms of the ‘story’. Propositions and stories are very different and we respond to them very differently. It’s easy to argue with a proposition; it’s impossible to argue with a story. Stories are