What our pols read on their hols This summer it was hard to avoid laudatory pieces about or extracts from the Drew Weston’s book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.(1) Here, it was said, was the explanation of how George Bush beat the Democrats and – by … Read more
Obituaries Ace Hayes (1940-1998) by Daniel Brandt Ace R. Hayes, 58, an activist and political researcher who was well-known in the Portland, Oregon area, died on February 13, 1998 from an aneurism in the brain. Corruption and conspiracy in high places is the name of the game, but Ace was on the case. His broad … Read more
House of Bush, House of Saud Craig Unger New York: Scribner, 2004, h/back, $26.00 I bought this because it was reported in the UK that the book couldn’t be published here due to our ‘stricter’ libel laws. Naturally, I wondered who among the Bushes and the Saudis might consider themselves libelled. The book is … Read more
Michael Phayer Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, p/b, £15.99 In 1997, urged on by the US government, fourteen European countries together with Canada and Argentina, established commissions to investigate the involvement of their banks in the holding of assets looted by the Nazis and their allies during the Holocaust. One particular sovereign state refused … Read more
MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 A Life: A. J. Ayer Ben Rogers Chatto and Windus, London, 1999, £20 Many books on intelligence matters simply rehash old ‘facts’, adding a new twist to – a slightly different interpretation of – well-known, if not necessarily well-understood, events. If … Read more
Is the picture on the right that of the old Spycatcher himself, Peter Wright? It has been used as if it is three times, in the Sunday Times on 12 July 1987 and 16 October 1988; and more recently, the version shown, heavily cropped to illustrate Wright’s obituary in the Independent, 28 April 1995. It … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines … Read more
SIS is dead – you read it first in Lobster – but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, has been … Read more
