Newsinger on KItson

Lobster Issue

A Work of Camouflage Intelligent Warfare: The Memoirs of General Sir Frank Kitson GBE, KCB, MC and Bar, DL Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2024, £25 h/b John Newsinger What is most interesting about this posthumous memoir by General Frank Kitson is what it does not say, exactly how little it contributes to our knowledge and […]

Still thinking about Dallas

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[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 […]

The SIS and London-based foreign dissidents: some patterns of espionage

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[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 […]

Lobster review: Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003

Lobster Issue

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 […]

Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] another, had been schooled in the brutality of grassroots organising by John Spellar, the ageing warhorse of the old right who made a point of reading the Communist Morning Star to learn of his enemies’ activities, and to celebrate if a hard-left organiser of his acquaintance was on its obituaries page. Margaret McDonagh, Blair’s […]

Newton on Keynes

Lobster Issue

[…] over the requirements of material sustenance and the drudgery of mindless wage work’.10 It was a vision which bore some striking similarities to Marx’s vision of a Communist society, where ‘society regulates the general production’ and scarcity would cease to exist, ending all need for the division of labour: ‘nobody has one exclusive sphere […]

The Lexit delusion

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[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 […]

The Story of British Propaganda Film by Scott Anthony

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar