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
Russ Kick (ed) New York, The Disinformation Company, 2003, 350pp, $24.95 / £17.99 (available in the UK from Counter Productions and Turnaround Distribution) ISBN 0-9713942-4-5 This is the third compilation of essays from Disinformation, and, unlike the first two, nearly all the essays in this anthology have been written specifically for this publication, with … Read more
Nicola Calipari’s death If the tragic death of ‘Nicola Calipari’, the international oper-ations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, in March 2005, was, as has been alleged, a deliberate act rather than misadventure, it is one of the most recent examples of extreme PR ‘message management’ I can think of. ([1]) ‘Public relations’ is about … Read more
Preface This paper was written for the History Workshop 20 in Leeds, during November 1986. In the workshop which I gave, I introduced the paper by pointing out that the arguments within it were very general and the paper itself entirely polemical. I explained that each of my last three books contain detailed case histories … Read more
From Les Raphael A comment on Garrick Alder’s reference in Lobster 43 to the Zinoviev letter story. It’s a myth that the letter cost Labour the 1924 election, loaded with false implications, such as: that Labour had a majority to begin with (they only won 191 seats in 1923 – and only contested 427 out … Read more
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a … Read more
Dominic Streatfeild London: Hodder and Stoughton 2006, £20, h/b One of the gaps in the parapolitical library has been a great pull-together of the material on ‘mind control’. And Streatfield has done it, and done it rather well. He is a documentary film-maker and some of the chapters here read rather like scripts. All … Read more
A spook, moi? One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow … Read more
‘Let me through! I’m an academic conspiracy expert.’ Peter Knight London and New York: Routledge, 2000 p/b £16.99, h/b £60 Page one of this book or, rather more accurately, page ix, the first page of text, saw my heart sinking. There, above the preface, was a quote from Don DeLillo’s novel about Lee Harvey … Read more
Beatrix Campbell London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008, p/b, £14.99 ‘The rule of law is the cornerstone of democracy,’ a High Court judge said in February in relation to the case of alleged torture of a British resident held in Guantamo Bay. This book is solely about Northern Ireland’s recent history and it shows how … Read more
