The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006 Mark Phythian London: Routledge, 2007, £19.99, p/b Reviewed by: Bernard Porter The title of this book is slightly misleading – at any rate, it misled me. I was expecting a broader treatment of Labour’s debates over issues of war and foreign relations, which would have included colonial … Read more
Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement 1923-1945 Julie Gottlieb, London: I.B. Tauris, 2000, £39.50 The Viceroy’s Daughters Anne de Courcy London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20.00 Blackshirts on-Sea J. S. Booker London: Brockinday Publications, 1999, £18.00 Fascism is generally regarded as a fiercely masculine political movement committed to excluding women from the worlds … Read more
The apparent re-election of George W. Bush as US President seems to have its roots in a mechanical failure. On 12 March 2004, a car went out of control on a busy highway and propelled itself in front of an 18-wheeler. The driver – an African-American clergyman called Athan Gibbs – was killed outright. Gibbs, … Read more
Greg Grandin New York: Metropolitan books, 2006, $25.00 Reviewing a biography of Harold Laski in 1953,([1]) the historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked on ‘the dilemma of our times’: that ‘no-one who believes in liberty can ever work sincerely with communists, or trust them, yet no-one who has socialism in his bones can ever … Read more
Mobile phones cause cancer, and other modern horror stories It appears that the facts about the medical hazards of electromagnetic fields and mobile phones and their masts are breaking into the mainstream consciousness in this country. Who now wants to live near a mobile phone mast? There are major protests all over the world about … Read more
Harold Smith (Lobster 25) Observer editor Jonathan Fenby replied to a letter from Harold Smith on 17 June, 1993: ‘I don’t think it is a story we want to go back over.’ Back over? On 4 July the Observer ran a third of a page on the political situation in Nigeria, ‘New rules, new date, … Read more
The privatisation of part of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) has been generally reported as a financial scandal. More important is what it tells us about the politics of New Labour. There are two dimensions to this: first there is New Labour’s commitment to big business and in particular to … Read more
Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006 If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney’s conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that … Read more
Gordon Winter In Lobster 18, dated October 1989, under the headline: ‘Inside BOSS and After‘, you wrote the following: ‘Gordon Winter is an Englishman who was recruited by BOSS. His 1981 book Inside BOSS, was the first (and only) inside account of South Africa’s intelligence agency. We still think this is one of the most … Read more
Kevin Danaher (ed.) Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, U.S., 2001, $15.95 www.commoncouragepress.com This volume contains 27 short essays by everyone from Fidel Castro (rather impressive, if he wrote it himself) through Chomsky, and Naomi Klein to Margot Smith, whose essay is titled ‘Granny Goes to Washington and Goes to Jail’. So: this runs from … Read more
