Don't forget the cigarettes for Tommy,” ran one patriotic British ditty during the first world war. American generals told their government they needed “tobacco as much as bullets”; charities sent cigarettes to the front-line. After the war, non-smokers seemed odd. The crime writer, Agatha Christie, even apologised for not smoking. She had tried many times, she said, but just could not like it.

In this solidly researched, interesting and only occasionally strident book, Christopher Snowdon, an independent researcher, documents the cigarette’s journey from patriotic necessity to pariah status. There had always been those who found smoking “loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs,” as James I put it in 1604. Some despots, in Hindustan and Persia, went further, slitting smokers’ lips or pouring molten lead down their throats. American prohibitionists claimed that smoking led to moral decay; Nazis that it was a decadent Jewish habit. But few non-bigots thought that their personal distaste warranted limiting the freedom of others.

Once the awful effects of smoking on health became clear, however, smokers could be harassed for their own good. And the notion of passive smoking allowed campaigners to go even further, and seek to stamp out smoking almost everywhere. In America, lawyers got involved. “Flies to honey, vampires to blood — but we’ve got a glut of lawyers out there just looking for someone to sue,” said John Banzhaf, the founder of ASH, an anti-smoking group. The Master Settlement Agreement of 1997, which cost tobacco firms $246 billion, much of it to be spent on anti-smoking measures, meant that after decades of barefaced lying, Big Tobacco found itself outspent and outmanoeuvred.

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