What is Opus Dei?

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Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99   Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the […]

We The Nation: The Conservative Party and the Pursuit of Power

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] contract by the undiplomatic Geldof to polish the public appearances of the FCO is linked to the closeness of the former Boomtown Rat to Blair and Gordon Brown in last year’s G8 gathering is a question not likely to be asked by the many journalists now on the Geldof payroll. On Ten Alps’ books […]

The meaning of the QinetiQ scandal

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] and the installation of Jennifer Moses, former managing director of Goldman Sachs, as a special adviser at 10 Downing Street.(1) She has been brought in to advise Brown on welfare reform! If the Thatcher government had appointed someone like her to such a position, Labour MPs would have been outraged. Today, barely a murmur. […]

The state in politics: Wallace, Holroyd and Lobster

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] asking Boothroyd to inform on four MPs was just one of many contacts between MI5 and the Parliamentary Labour Party in the sixties. Four years earlier George Brown, then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Chair of the Party’s Organisation Sub-committee, its policing function, approached the journalist Chapman Pincher and told him that […]

The Blairs and their Court

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

Francis Beckett and David Hencke London: Aurum Press, 2004, £18.99, h/b   According to Beckett and Hencke, in the late 1980s Nigel Lawson could never understand why Tony Blair was a member of the Labour Party rather than of the Conservative Party. This question subsequently occurred to a growing number of Labour Party members and […]

Denis Healey

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b.   Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation […]

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 […]

Recent JFK (and related) literature

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

BROWN, Walt. Referenced Index Guide to the Warren Commission. Wilmington (Delaware): elmax, 1995. 303 pps. An essential work of navigation for anyone sailing the seas of the Report and the Hearings and Exhibits. Supplements rather than replaces the search facilities on the Warren Commission CD-ROMs. COLLOM, Mark, and SAMPLE, Glen. The Men on […]

US involvement in the Fiji coup d’etat

Lobster Issue 14 (1987)

[…] co-chairing a PDU meeting at Pacific Harbour outside Suva. At this meeting were Brian Talboys, Sue Wood and Barry Leay, all of the National Party, and Neil Brown, Australian Liberal Party deputy leader and foreign affairs spokesman. The PDU meeting provided a kind of alibi for Mara, and both Talboys and Brown lent support […]

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