A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE WORK OF NON-FICTION
A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Meticulous, clinical and sobering, a shockingly important and incisive book' David Olusoga

Vast and revelatory, Dan Gretton's I You We Them is an unprecedented study of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity: the 'desk killers' who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the modern era. From Albert Speer's complicity in Nazi barbarism to cases of ecocide and the deaths of activists, Gretton shines a light on the figures 'who, by giving orders, use paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun.' Over the past twenty years, Gretton has interviewed survivors and perpetrators, and pored over archives and thousands of pages of testimony. His remarkable insight into the psychology of the desk killers is deepened by the intimate journey he travels with his readers.

"This remarkably powerful book entails a dogged and worldwide pursuit of 'the desk-killer', the government functionary or business executive whose decisions so often cost human lives. The model of this remote-control assassin is Hitler's architect Albert Speer, but the German story is subsumed in a far more compelling and modern investigation of the collective amnesia which so often operates in the telling of national histories, including our own." - Spectator, Books of the Year