Consensus-building legitimacy has to do not just with reason but also, of course, emotion – what feels right. We think something is right and good based on what ‘feels’ that way, appealing to normative ideas and sentiments behind rationales (to paraphrase one of my interviewees, in combining the prose of policy with the poetry of politics). Whether this book speaks to students or scholars of populist movements, technocratic managerialism, policy elites, or Indian politics, it contributes to a growing corpus of knowledge on strategies of the powerful. Studying the politicisation of expertise provides invaluable understanding of how the right wing is able to construct effective narratives and be convincing of its multiple, potentially contradictory, formations.

Many claim that Polish theatre is political. Joanna Krakowska maps this narrative in Polish historiography, which, as she stresses, is usually construed in cycles determined by political events. Politicality, however, is a capacious and diverse category that offers the possibility of seeing theatre in Poland both as political and as a medium declaring itself to be apolitical, which can become the most meaningful political gesture of all. Krakowska invites us to consider theatre history in relation to the political subject while Grzegorz Niziołek asserts that ‘Polish mainstream theatre is anti-political rather than political’. He demonstrates how political analysis is usurped by an ethical imperative and is thus seen as a threat to the national values – rather than political theatre, theatre was used to strengthen national identity, which obscured wrongdoing. Nevertheless, even theatre that is not explicitly political, Niziołek argues, has produced political effects, and any given historical moment positions theatre in relation to a dominant ideology.