Climbing the Bookshelves

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] read Climbing the Bookshelves by the former Labour Cabinet minister who helped launch the short-lived SDP in 1981. Sure enough the wise words I’d heard on the BBC were there. But so was her description of how as a 21-year-old Oxford student the then Shirley Catlin was funded by the US government to take […]

Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] (p. 27) Many of these New Labour MPs who had been parachuted into their safe seats by the party machine returned to Westminster after the 2015 This BBC documentary made at the time of the 2017 general election gives a flavour of the attitudes of leading figures in the Parliamentary Labour Party at the […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] bullshit basket he calls for some global action which he knows will never take place but which he thinks sounds impressive. His latest was reported on the BBC News website: he wants a ‘global fund for education’.6 No doubt this will be next on the list after the new global financial system he wants […]

MI5 speaks to the nation!

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: MI5 speaks to the nation! Nick Must ‘How MI5 is adapting to fight coronavirus’1 was the headline on a BBC news online piece by Gordon Corera. In relation to that potential change in working practices, it quoted soon-to-depart MI5 chief, Sir Andrew Parker, thus: ‘You’ll understand if I don’t go into exactly the ways […]

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] for the British state. He writes: I loved and was thankful for the monarchy, Parliament, the army, the rule of law, the NHS, the Foreign Office, the BBC and everything that the United Kingdom stood for. I considered liberal capitalism the best system of economics the world has had. I was a conventional Conservative. […]

We don’t need no…

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] was necessary to let him make friendly things (sic) to the manufacturing people.’ 12 (emphasis added) Mrs Thatcher also bought this line. In his memoir, the former BBC political correspondent, John Cole, describes asking Mrs Thatcher for an example of how this ‘service’ or ‘post-industrial economy’ would work: ‘She cited an entrepreneur she had […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] out: ‘Whatever these Western government ministers might say publicly, they could not claim to be unaware of Kagame’s tactics’. Where they were unsuccessful was in getting the BBC, CNN or Al Jazeera to give the tape recordings an airing. (pp. 77-78) Why then was the Rwandan regime so liked in the West? Tony Blair […]

The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] describe Lockerbie in her memoirs, had wanted a more doughty foe than Dr Swire she’d have been hard put to find one. A former Army officer and BBC television engineer who then retrained as a general practitioner, Flora’s father was just the kind of honourable, hard-working and patriotic figure Thatcher told us was the […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] fine imposed and the expenses incurred by the Telegraph dealing with the court case. Harebrained? ‘Page 8’ was a film written and directed by David Hare on BBC 2 on 28 August 2011, in which Bill Nighy played a suave, sophisticated senior MI5 officer who saves the Service from being being destroyed in a […]

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