More, please In an account of his career as a writer of spy fiction (Guardian 16 November ’89) John Le Carré referred to the hostile reaction received by his (unnamed) second book, presumably The Looking Glass War: ‘Critics and public alike rejected the novel, but this time the spies were cross. And since the British … Read more
Robert Caro New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK) (But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com) This is the third volume in Caro’s biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their … Read more
I sent the following by e-mail to a number of people: ‘Thus Martin Jacques in the New Statesman: ‘For the next 30 years, neoliberalism – the belief in the market rather then the state, the individual rather than the social – exercised a hegemonic influence over British politics, with the creation of New Labour signalling … Read more
Where’s Ware? John Ware is one of the leading British TV journalists of our age. He has worked for World in Action and Panorama and is held in very high regard by his colleagues. Having produced a number of documentaries on the war in Northern Ireland he is now seen as an expert on the … Read more
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
Publications The Andropov Deception John Rossiter (Sherwood Press, London 1984) ‘John Rossiter’ is Brian Crozier, long-time asset of British and American intelligence agencies. (see Times 29 October 1984), and this is quite the worst – and worst written – thriller I’ve read (even worse than The Spike). Rather like The Spike, The Andropov Deception is … Read more
Paul Bruce Blake Publishing, London 1995, £15.99 The pseudonymous author claims to have been a member of a clandestine 4-man SAS squad which assassinated a couple of dozen alleged IRA members in the 1971-3 period in Northern Ireland. The author’s taped and transcribed memories are intercut with sections from an uncredited ghost writer – apparently … Read more
Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines … Read more
John Newsinger Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave; 2002 hb £47.50 To my knowledge this is the first account of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars written from a radical left stand-point. By which I don’t mean that it is a load of left rhetoric – that is entirely absent; but the assumptions about legitimacy and right are on … 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
