Clockwork Orange 2 Jottings Here is another, previously unpublished section from Wallace’s 1974 jottings for the aborted operation ‘Clockwork Orange 2’. Can Politicians Be Trusted? N. St. Stevas: homosexual – boyfriend of Elton John’s manager – cocaine user at parties Homosexual relationships – Heath, Van Straubenzee, St. John Stevas, Thorpe Child prostitution: William McGrath, Van … Read more
Pat Daly was the prime prosecution witness at the trial of two Irish National Liberation Army men at the Old Bailey in 1993. They were accused of conspiracy to steal explosives, conspiracy to cause explosions and possession of firearms with intent to endanger life. Daly lived in Bristol at Southmead from 1969 to 1989. Before … Read more
Nexus: postmodernism or what? I wonder what posterity will make of Nexus magazine. It continues to be just about the most fascinating and the most infuriating thing which plops through my letter-box. Take the April-May 2000 issue. On the positive side there is a very interesting and maybe very important piece on the soya bean, … Read more
James McConnachie and Robin Tudge, London, New York: Rough Guide Ltd (Penguin Books), 2005, p/b £9.99 / $14.99 (US) / $22.99 (Can) This chunky paperback is intended to give readers an introduction to the world of conspiracies and the theories around them, as opposed to works which discuss conspiracy theories as a topic in … Read more
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the … Read more
British traditions in decline include a sense of the ridiculous as a weapon of state, jingoism and understatement. The last of these was always a brilliant British con: you only have to look at the gothic majesty of the palace of Westminster (Parliament) to realise we have never really done understatement. ‘A sense of the … Read more
Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
Suffer the innocents? The Stevens inquiry into Britain’s state assassination policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s began in September 1989. The police officers who signed up for it didn’t think it would take long to do. ‘We thought it was going to be a fairly routine investigation. We didn’t expect to find that there … Read more
Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister Penguin, 1997, £6.99 George Orwell said that Robinson Crusoe was a good example of a bad book, clumsily written but of natural interest due to its subject. The same is true here. Heroic and triumphant in tone, the troika of authors concentrate mainly on the paraphernalia, research and … Read more
