A review of Lobster in the Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003.
[PDF file]: […] Larkin. HE Lobster story begins in Edinburgh in 1948 when Ramsay was born, the eldest child of a food chemist father and housewife mother. Both parents were Communist Party members until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, so Ramsay grew up in a bookish, lefty atmosphere which encouraged a sort of instinctive hostility […]
[PDF file]: […] this is undoubtedly true. Orwell, however, was not ‘appropriated’ by British intelligence services. He willingly cooperated with them, particularly in passing on the names of suspected 1 Communist fellow-travellers. Referring to the abolition of the Central Office of Information in 2011, Anthony also states (p. 20), ‘The constraints on centralised state power that existed […]
[PDF file]: […] the left of the Labour Party in Parliament and the constituencies, the large trade unions (notably the Transport and General Workers and the Engineering Workers) and the Communist Party. Their most articulate spokesperson was Tony Benn, Industry Secretary in Harold Wilson’s Labour government at the time. The case made by Benn and his supporters […]
[…] who, as vice president had been excluded from the major war decisionmaking, and was a believer in the threat posed by international communism. The crusade against the communist threat was irresistible and those who opposed it were ignored or crushed as com-symps, fellow-travellers, naifs. George Kennan, deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow […]
[PDF file]: […] Furnival Jones, MI5’s Director, no previous Prime Minister had ever shown ‘such enthusiasm for regular up-to-the-minute reports during an industrial dispute’. Wilson was particularly pleased that the Communist Party headquarters was ‘comprehensively bugged’. And he actively encouraged rightwing union leaders to collaborate with MI5. One of the leading figures in the GMWU, Sir Harry […]
[PDF file]: […] equivalents are working for their country. The murder of a British businessman who worked in China and was associated with the now disgraced Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party chief of Chongqing who was once tipped for high office, was characterised by systematic British media undermining of the dead man’s character (presumably because it […]
[PDF file]: […] ‘gentlemen’ professional soldiers, who came to be exemplified by Mike Hoare. Demobbed at the end of WWII with the rank of Major, and an admittedly virulent anti- Communist, he led the mercenary force which fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from July ‘64 to December ‘65. In those intense 18 months he […]
[PDF file]: […] Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano; and as recent analysis seems to have confirmed, the photographs of him posing with the rifle and American left newspapers, both Trotskyist and Communist, were authentic (despite his claim that they had been faked).13 In his memoir Chauncey Holt tells us that, in the months before the assassination, the weapons […]
