John McMurtry London: Pluto Press, 2002, pb £15.99 I shouldn’t be reviewing this. I haven’t digested it properly and it is going to take some time to do so. But I don’t want to leave this for six months without promoting it. I used to try and preserve books in good condition, didn’t write … Read more
Get Gough! The loans affair conspiracy Dennis Freney (Dennis Freney, PO Box A716, Sydney, New South Wales 2000, Australia – £4.50 airmail, £3.75 seamail: international money orders only) In Lobster 11 (p31) we referred to CIA operations in Australia in the middle 1970s. Since then we have received Freney’s Get Gough!, the most detailed account … Read more
Julian Amery Pre-war model Tory social imperialist who evoked enormous affection – even idolatry – in some quarters. Recent chair of the Pinay Circle. Laudatory obituaries in the House Magazine 7 October 1996, the Spectator 7 September 1996 and The Times 4 September 1996. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Varyl Begg (Obituary, Independent, 15 July … Read more
David W. Wrone University Press of Kansas; 2003, h/b, $29.99 (UK prices vary) In the conclusion to his Pocket Essentials Who Shot JFK?, the editor of this journal asked: ‘Where are the historians?’ David Wrone is a former Professor of History at Kansas University, and so his book provides at least part of an … Read more
Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
Inside the League Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986) This is the only book I know on the World Anti-Communist League. Most of it is new to me but the few bits I am familiar with look accurate, and it is reasonably well documented. It is really in … Read more
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
Mark Felt is ‘Deep Throat’. Bob Woodward says so, and his word is law in this particular arena. No matter that Woodward had a dozen sources, some of whom may have been more important than Throat himself. The point is that ‘Throat’ is anyone Woodward says he is, and he says he is Felt. In … Read more
W. H. Bowart, Self-published, Tucson, Arizona, 1994. Operation Mind Control was originally published in 1978 by Dell Paperbacks. It came out around the same time as John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a rather anodyne book which, after dealing with CIA and military LSD experiments which caused at least one unwitting victim to … Read more
