Back from the brink by Alistair Darling

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] we faced. It would hark back to the wilderness years, when Labour appeared unelectable.’ p. 65 Don’t you love the political perspective? Facing economic armageddon, Darling and Brown are worried that the electorate might be reminded of Old Labour. He says nationalising Lloyds/HBOS was ‘the last thing I wanted…. bringing with it all the […]

JFK’s assassination: a big new book and a strange memoir

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] just before the assassination. This account of the meeting is similar though not identical to the material in the memoir of LBJ’s putative mistress, the late Madeleine Brown, Texas in the Morning 6 and the version attributed to the late ‘Loy’ Factor in The Men on the Sixth Floor, originally a book and now […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Simon Matthews, ‘The once and future king?’ in Lobster 56. 18 And the fact that he did so is one of the reasons the NuLab faction – Brown, Blair et al – detested him: he knew more than they did, knew they were talking shit and told them so. For a political leader, like […]

Climate hysterics: useful idiots or just idiots

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] of two world wars and the previous destruction of 400 years of slavery and colonialism, white folks were threatened by an explosion in the number of ‘ brown people’. Of course the book did not use such explicit language but anyone who read the list of countries could see that what was to be […]

THEY KNEW: how a culture of conspiracy keep America complacent by Sarah Kendzior

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: Conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts THEY KNEW How a Culture of Conspiracy keeps America Complacent Sarah Kendzior New York: Flatiron Books 2022 John Newsinger Sarah Kendzior is one of the most interesting commentators writing about contemporary America. Her two previous books, The View from Flyover Country (2018) and Hiding in Plain Sight (2020), are essential […]

Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom by John Strafford

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] was followed by becoming a Privy Councillor in 2006 and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the new Ministry of Justice in May 2007. In June 2007 Gordon Brown appointed her to the Cabinet as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council. In October 2008 she replaced Peter Mandelson as […]

Sailing Close To The Wind: Reminiscences by Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] I breathe’. What is needed to deal with the likes of Ashley are ‘new employment and trade union rights’. But he doesn’t explain why the Blair and Brown Labour governments did not introduce such legislation between 1997 and 2010. The book’s best chapter is on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which he describes as ‘the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] years 8 See for example Not that this makes a change from NuLab. See James Chapman, ‘Meet Labour’s City cronies: The roll call of bankers rewarded by Brown and Blair’, The Daily Mail 12 February 2009. 9 These are detailed in James Lyons, ‘NHS reform leaves Tory backers with links to private healthcare firms […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] the English political stage seem able to contemplate changes to this. Certainly the efforts of Labour pre-2010 do not inspire confidence. Great store was set by Gordon Brown in 2009 in the establishment of the International Centre for Financial Regulation was announced. Designed to map out the future of responsible capitalism, it came with […]

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