On August 27th this year the British Channel Four TV programme ‘The Real X-Files’ gave a glimpse of the long history of US psychic research programs. As most of these programmes have been ‘black’, the true results and serious nature of the research have been concealed from the public and Congress. The triggering mechanism for … Read more
Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America 1947-2000 Sally Denton and Roger Morris London: Pimlico, 2002, pb, £15 John Burnes It’s hardly news that Las Vegas was a city run by the Mob. Or that it was fuelled by financial corruption. Or that both of these … Read more
Mark Curtis Pluto Press, London and Sterling, VA, USA, 1996, £45 hb, £14.99, pb One of the most intellectually interesting areas I have read through is the debate on the origins of the Cold War between the orthodox establishment apologists for ‘containment of communism’ and the so-called Cold War revisionists like Williams and Kolko, who … Read more
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke I.B.Tauris, London, 1992, £9.95. In his last paragraph the author concludes: ‘Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant … Read more
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower William Blum Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $16.95 Globalize This! The battle against the World Trade Organization and corporate rule eds. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95 I have lumped these together partly because they are both published … Read more
‘Rug merchants’ was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan’s dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North’s Mideast … Read more
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most … Read more
Most of a talk given at Housman’s bookshop in March. The talks in this book (1) kind of parallel some of the things that I have been writing about elsewhere. I began publishing Lobster in 1983; and I also joined the Labour Party that year, partly, I confess, because it seemed a likely source of … Read more
