[…] began writing the 007 books, the official story is that Fleming began to write ‘the spy story to end all spy stories’ in order to ‘take his mind off an impending marriage’. While marriage for the long time bachelor was certainly in the works, other more important things were on his mind. Noel Coward, […]
[PDF file]: The two Goulds Robin Ramsay In ‘The crisis’ in issue 62 of Lobster I referred to the economic debate during the Labour Party’s policy review, which produced the Meet the Challenge, Make the Change document in 1989. On page 6 of that are these sentences: The Conservatives are the party for the City. We are […]
[PDF file]: […] is at 2 scepticism (given full wind on social media) when post-election stories about anomalous results started to trickle in. The example that is foremost in my mind is the constituency of Bedford Borough, my place of birth and a key Tory-Labour marginal. Here it was reported that a sack containing 5,000 extra votes […]
[PDF file]: […] of war), the length and verbosity of the various US enquiries set up to determine culpability for being ‘unprepared’ at Pearl Harbour, suggest a widespread frame of mind that takes as its starting point that America is entitled to regard itself as invulnerable.1 This conclusion is strengthened by the author neglecting to discuss the […]
[…] review was reposted at Aaronovitch Watch at . put on their front pages the fact that the Labour Party had hired a former Obama strategist to master mind their forthcoming election campaign. Of course they looked to America. Where else? As these columns have reported ad nauseam for nearly twenty years, the Labour Party […]
[…] When I look around the Commons, I see dozens of people who have made a lasting difference for good’. Even those MPs whose political ideas ‘may to mind be completely round the twist, unfeeling and cruel’ nevertheless did not start out ‘misguided, let alone evil’. (pp. 14-15). This seems to be taking Christian charity […]
[PDF file]: […] lost source as the Q-Diary for convenience.5 Enter Epstein Under what circumstances did the Q-Diary get redrafted into the manuscript we know today? This question exercised the mind of assassination researcher Edward Jay Epstein in the 1970s as he amassed the material that would form the basis for his 1978 Legend:The Secret World of […]
[PDF file]: […] chess master Natan Sharansky, or writer Alexander Solshenitsyn, once household names in the West but neither of whom are ‘celebrities’ in the West today. Also keep in mind that this is a two-way generational phenomenon. Young Eastern Europeans have absolutely no memory of Communism or the former Soviet system any more than Western ones […]
[PDF file]: […] about this, remembering the dominance of Oxbridge-educated elites in British politics during the 1960s and 1970s when I was a young man. Recently, however, I changed my mind. The key moment for me was an MA dissertation by a student of mine, on the impact of the 1979 Brandt Report (North-South: a programme for […]
[PDF file]: […] sabotage has surfaced. But, from Haldeman’s January 1969 encounter with Nixon (described above), we know that Nixon entered office with his own subterfuge weighing heavily on his mind. This might have been compounded by the fact that, when he took office, Nixon abandoned any pretence at seeking peace and escalated the Vietnam War instead. […]
