Critique, mentioned in these columns before (Lobster 8), is a California-based “Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics”. It’s editor, Bob Banner, has had the good taste to reprint pieces from Lobster. Critique’s slogan – now available on T-shirts! – is; Question consensus reality. Well, amen to that. However, the bit of “consensus reality” – and Banner … Read more
Responsibilities, old boy The Big Breach Richard Tomlinson Cutting Edge, Edinburgh, 2000, £9.99 I found it hard to ‘see’ this because so much of its contents have been published in the media. There have been some changes – names altered – since the newspaper versions; and I am told that the original hardback version … Read more
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of … Read more
ed. ‘Nigel West’ Faber and Faber, London, 1993 The title isn’t to be taken seriously. This is 610 pages of short extracts from some of the books written by British MI5 and MI6 personnel, with short biographical sections by ‘West’. Some of this is quite interesting — lots of it was new to me — … Read more
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire Anne Norton New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004 $25/£16 What’s the Matter with America? Thomas Frank The Resistable Rise of the American Right London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, £12 Most of us in Europe find it difficult to understand what happened in America on … Read more
23. Book Review. The Round Table The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes To Cliveden Carroll Quigley (Books in Focus, New York 1981) This, I think, is the most important book ever written about the British ruling class and its foreign policy. In outline Quigley has rewritten the political and diplomatic history of Britain (and thus some … Read more
Mark Perry William Morrow and Co, New York, 1992 I’m not even sure if this has actually been published in the U.K.: I’d never heard of it until this copy turned up in my local library with a UK price stuck over the dollar price, suggesting a few were imported. This should have been sub-titled … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
Frances Stoner Saunders Granta, London, 1999, £20 There isn’t much worth saying about this book that hasn’t been said in the many reviews it has had since it appeared in July.(1) This is a big book, 425 pages of text, another 80 plus of notes, bibliography, index. It is well written, witty – a major … Read more
Spectre In the last Lobster 35 I reported on the new anti-EU magazine Spectre and wondered about its political orientation. In response, the editor, Steve McGiffen, sent an exemplary piece of candour from which here are some extracts. ‘….. Our original statement, sent out very widely, made it clear that we are minimalist to a … Read more
