The Verney case Y Cyfamodwr is the paper of the Welsh Nationalist organisation whose initials are CCCYCRh, but about whom I know nothing. The issue for Winter 1993/4 contained a piece on a mysterious, now abandoned, site in the middle of a forest in Wales. The site used to be guarded by armed troops, was … Read more
Brian Crozier Foreword by Sir James Goldsmith The Claridge Press, London, 1995, £12.95 One of the odd things about the James Goldsmith Referendum Party gambit in the recent election is the way the mass media collectively chose not to refer back to the last great Goldsmith campaign – his hunt for the Red Menace … Read more
Rufus Gunn Swaffham: The Gay Men’s Press, London, 1997, £8.95 pb This is an intriguing and highly readable mix of fact and fiction, likely to be of interest to students of parapolitics and film buffs alike. Set in 1956, the book explores the wary friendship of the newly knighted Anthony Blunt and the black-listed American … Read more
Back to the future: the USA, the UK and Iraq The US threatens to attack Iraq and is backed by the UK. There are objections in the UN Security Council from Russia and France. A large task force is assembled. Guess what happens next? Not a lot. There is a diplomatic crisis temporarily resolved after … Read more
Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he … Read more
Feedback From Ernest Wistrich Dear Sir, I have read the article ‘Spinning the European Union: pro-European propaganda campaigns in the British media’ by Andy Mullen in your Winter 2002 issue. Whilst it contains a number of minor inaccuracies it includes one major misrepresentation, namely that the European Movement, of which I was director between 1969 … Read more
The story ‘The lethal bomb that does not kill’ (Daily Telegraph 27 September 1992) proves that there is military interest in this country in microwaves. The story itself is a plant from the Ministry of Defence. Its purpose is unknown. In the United States the microwave/mind control subject has been taken up by the Association … Read more
Armen Victorian Vision Paperbacks, London, 1999, £9.99 With the addition of a four new essays, this books contains the writing of Armen Victorian published in Lobster since his first essay appeared in Lobster 23 in 1992 (and issues 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 30, 31, 32, 32, 34 and 36). Most welcome of the … Read more
Christopher Simpson, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994. This is the Simpson who wrote Blowback. This is hard to describe. From the cover blurb: the author demonstrates how the government-funded psychological warfare programs of the Cold War years under-wrote the academic studies that formed the basis for much of modern communication research.’ I … Read more
Phoenix: Policing the Shadows Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1996 The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland Caroline Kennedy-Piper Longman, London, 1997 The war in Northern Ireland is apparently in its closing stages. There is still some way to go before it is all over, however, and undoubtedly there … Read more
