Nodark clouds literally blew in during the financial storm. No flowers actuallybloomed during the Arab Spring. And when we save data to a cloud, our filesdon't really reside in a fluffy white mass of condensed water vapour.

Weuse metaphor once every sixteen words. Using imagery to conceptualise abstractthought is wholly natural and has led to some of the greatest intellectualbreakthroughs in history, from Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' to James Watson's'building blocks of DNA'. But what if this power was turned against humanity?In Nazi Germany, Hitler depicted the Jews as vermin and 6 million people werekilled. MRI scans show the brain struggles to differentiate between the literaland metaphoric, enabling the illegitimate to appear legitimate and good peopleto turn evil.

Topspeechwriter Simon Lancaster goes on a mission to find out how metaphors arebeing used and misused today. He finds that the same images reoccur,repeatedly, around the world. Such imagery is ubiquitous, crucially shaping andmoulding the way we experience and view events.

Thisbook raises profound questions about the power of language and the language ofpower.