The dark side of Washington: Seymour Hersh and the Kennedy legacy

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from […]

Letter from America

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] of the story, he is (as Dave Letterman might say) just plain goofy. False Quotation Syndrome He may be worse than that. Researchers Harold Weisberg and Walt Brown, as well as medical expert Dr. Gary Aguilar, have been double-checking Posner’s claimed interview subjects. Apparently, the Warren Commission’s foremost apologist has seriously misrepresented some of […]

Historical Notes: Wilson and sterling in 1964

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] then, in the 1990s, by ‘new’ Labour. The criticisms from the right were reinforced from the left by arguments that Wilson, his Chancellor Jim Callaghan and George Brown, the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs (directly responsible for the National Plan), should have devalued immediately. This view was advocated at the time by Nicky […]

Fifth Column: The decadence of our political system

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] for deeds and orders are taken for their effects. Nor is this a new phenomenon. The political genius of the group that surrounded Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the 1990s was to see this system for what it was and then to develop rules for the acquisition of power that may have been […]

New Labour Notes

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] means but cannot say is that while a lower exchange rate would benefit manufacturing, since a lower exchange rate is not going to be forthcoming from Gordon Brown, British manufacturing is going to have to survive by improving its productivity. Like all Ministers at the DTI, Hewitt is essentially powerless against the chancellor of […]

A Game of Moles: the Deceptions of an MI6 Officer

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

Desmond Bristow with Bill Bristow Little, Brown and co., London, 1993 Shoot the marketing department. There is almost nothing about ‘moles’ in this book. The reality is a mildly interesting account of Bristow’s MI6 career from 1940-1956, most of it spent in Spain. A few names are named — but 40 years on, who […]

Tittle-tattle 1

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] made membership of the Euro its principal campaigning issue. Keen single currency enthusiasts on the paper include political editor Andrew Grice, columnists David Aaronovitch and Yasmin Alibhai- Brown (see below), and political commentator and author of the pulped Mandelson biography Donald Macintyre. Still influential at the paper now taking ‘the broader view’ is former […]

Maria Novotny: From Prague With Love

Lobster Issue 2 (1983)

In February this year, unnoticed by the press, a funeral took place in a quiet Sussex village. In attendance were some famous names from London society of the fifties and sixties, and two men in regulation dark suits from an undisclosed department of the Security Services. They had been contacts for the deceased, Maria Novotny, […]

Book reviews: David Stirling. Gemstone File. Eustace Clarence Mullins

Book review
Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, £17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn’t read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts […]

The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11

Lobster Issue

[…] it worked, another source did: Filin and Likhvintsev do business with foreign private military companies (PMCs): – «Meteoric Tactical Solutions» (South Africa) – in Angola; – «Kellogg, Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq. – «Diligence Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.” Their cooperation […]

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