The journalist Stefan Lorant (1901–1997), who was editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Münchner Illustrierte Presse until 1933 and was imprisoned for political reasons, escaped to London via Budapest and Paris. Shortly after his arrival in 1934, Lorant began planning new image-based magazines, which were not yet as established in the English press landscape as they were in Germany. Lorant was a founding figure of photojournalistic news transmission in England. He conceived Weekly Illustrated (founded 1934), invented Lilliput (founded 1937) and Picture Post (founded 1938). Lorant’s work in London was linked to a revival of his former working relationships with photographers such as Kurt Hutton (né Kurt Hübschmann, 1893–1960), Felix H. Man (né Felix Sigismund Baumann, 1893–1985) and Tim N. Gidal (1909–1996), who had also emigrated to England as well as Fritz Goro with his wife Carola Gregor and Fritz Henle, who emigrated to the U.S. They and other local and émigré photographers such as Bill Brandt (1904–1983), Wolf Suschitzky (1912–2016) and Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973) worked for Lilliput.
A satirical monthly magazine, named for the fictional island in Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels, Lilliput was published in a small pocket format (19 x 12 cm), with literary contributions by Ernest Hemingway, Ferenc Molnar, Liam O'Flaherty, Upton Sinclair and Alfred Polgar and a visual emphasis on photography and drawing. The covers were instantly recognisable: The artist Walter Trier – who would also become a political artist for the emigrant newspaper Die Zeitung in the 1940s – drew almost 150 covers between 1937 and 1949, revolving around the pictorial motif of a couple with a dog, varying through the seasons with different activities and states of mind, in a kind of “pictorial diary” (Neuner-Warthorst 2006, 234). These cover images ignore daily political business and the war and tyranny taking place on the European continent, and focus instead on the interactions between man, woman and pet. Lilliput was a supremely portable magazine that could be read on the go – on public transport or on a day out. The content had to be entertaining and the visual humour immediately accessible.

However, Lilliput was not an apolitical magazine. Alfred Polgar's short text “Fate in Five Words”, for example, raised the issue of the fate of refugees as homeless people with no possibility of return: “A long way ... From where?” (Polgar 1939, 411) In the pictorial section of the magazine, too, the foreign policy situation, especially National Socialism, was an ongoing theme, albeit treated in an entertaining manner.
Lorant’s visual strategy for Lilliput was juxtaposition, which offered him opportunities for political partisanship and agitation. Lilliput worked with pairs of images in which new and often comical lines of connection were established between two photographs. Lorant probably adapted the idea of juxtapositions from the German cultural magazine Der Querschnitt and discovered their potential for the English market (Willimowski 2005, 314). The US pocket magazine Coronet, founded in 1936, gave also a model for the concept of juxtapositions.
The juxtapositions functioned through formal analogies – a similar posture or facial expression – and a succinct caption that exposed relationships. Lorant was particularly fond of commenting on political developments in Nazi Germany at a time when most media in England were still keeping their distance. Lorant exposed the German political leadership in caricatures and photographs. On one double-page spread he commented on encounters in “Old Germany” and “New Germany”: in Old Germany two elderly ladies meet with hearty laughter, while the other photograph depicts the martial attitude of the new rulers. The uniformed Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess greet each other with a rigid Hitler salute, which was regularly mocked in Lilliput. In the juxtaposition, Lorant succeeds in bringing out the brutalisation of mores and the loss of humanity without losing sight of the grotesque appearance of the National Socialist leadership. The Minister of Propaganda encounters a subdued sea lion on a double page spread, Hitler’s angry body language is reflected in that of an enraged gorilla.
As early as 1938, Stefan Lorant sold the magazine to Edward Hulton, but remained editor-in-chief. When Lorant emigrated to the USA in 1940, the editorship of Lilliput fell to Tom Hopkinson. The magazine continued until 1960, when it was absorbed into the pornographic men's magazine Men Only.