David Sawyer was a New England aristocrat with dreams of a career as a film-maker; Scott Miller, the son of a shoe salesman, was a brilliant copywriter. Unlikely partners, their enormously influential campaigning company, Sawyer-Miller, directed democratic revolutions from the Philippines to Chile, steered a dozen presidents and prime ministers into office, and instilled the campaign ethic in corporate giants from Coca-Cola to Apple.

Long after the firm had broken up and sold out, its alumni had moved into the White House, to dozens of foreign countries and to the offices of America' blue-chip chief executives. The men of Sawyer-Miller were the Manhattan Project of spin politics: a small but extraordinary group who invented American-style political campaigning and exported it around the world.

In his marvellously readable narrative, James Harding tells the story of a few men whose political savvy, entrepreneurial drive and sheer greed would alter the landscape of global politics.