Colin Crawford. London: Pluto Press, 2003, £14.99, p/back When World-in-Action and Tribune journalist David Boulton published his excellent book, The UVF, 1966-73, (Torc Books, 1974) he bemoaned a near absence of valuable books and journal articles on Loyalism. In contrast to their Republican counterparts, Loyalists do not have a substantive support base overseas; nor … Read more
Sallie Pisani, University of Edinburgh Press, 1992 (UK) University Press of Kansas, 1991 (USA) No price stated Pisani lays out her thesis on pp. 7/8. ‘My claim is that the emphasis on paramilitary operations in the literature has led to a distorted picture of covert operations in this seminal period. In fact, a recreation of … Read more
Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more
All four of Tony Blair’s new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour’s Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The … Read more
The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism … Read more
The Persecution of Armen Victorian The persecution of Armen Victorian (and his wife), described in Lobster 28, seems to have come to a halt. All the charges against them have been dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As I expected, the prosecutions were sustained, via a number of postponements, until the last possible minute, then … Read more
The most reported episode at the 2002 Labour Party Conference was the tour of Blackpool made by ex-President Clinton and film star Kevin Spacey. Given the status and photogenic nature of the individuals concerned this was hardly surprising. Little was said in the media, though, about the duos’ grand entrance, accompanied by the Prime Minister … Read more
Volume 1: Reflections of the Participants, Mark Baimbridge (ed.) Volume 2: Current Analysis and Lessons for the Future, Mark Baimbridge, Philip Wyman and Andrew Mullen (eds.) Exeter (UK) and Charlottesville (USA): Imprint Academic, 2006, single volumes £17.95 (uk ) and $34.90 (US) Andrew Mullen, who has written about the EU in these columns, brought … Read more
