William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
Flat Earth News: An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media Nick Davies London: Chatto & Windus, 2008, £17.99, For many taking a dissenting view of our national life, The Guardian and The Observer have long been part of our diet – the morning fix that sustains us in our daily … Read more
[…] Random House hired him to write a book that would establish a conspiracy once and for all; Posner started investigating, found no evidence of a plot to kill JFK, and reported these findings to his publisher, who told him to go with what he found. ‘Tis a pretty tale, and utter bullshit. Well before […]
Drugs, oil and war Peter Dale Scott Oxford (UK) and New York : Rowman and Littlefield Inc; 2003, $22.95, p/b On the left-hand page facing his first page of text Scott gives us two definitions of deep politics, the concept he introduced which succeeded his earlier concept of parapolitics. deep politics: ‘all those political … Read more
Richard Keeble University of Luton Press, Luton, 1997, £14.95 Richard Keeble – a former journalist and now Course Director of the BA in Journalism degree at City University, London – makes his stance clear in the first chapter of this well researched study: There was no Gulf war of 1991…It was nothing less than a … Read more
Organisation, History and Politics In the early years of the Thatcher decade, the radical or ‘new’ right was generally treated as though it was a united palace guard for libertarian Conservatism. More recently it has become clearer that the radical right in Britain was, at best, an ‘anti wet’ alliance between authoritarian/ nationalist and libertarian/radical … Read more
[…] Donoughue in his Downing Street Diary) that Wilson’s doctor, Joseph Stone, thought that Falkender’s impact on Wilson was so bad and so serious that he offered to kill her. But none of the reviewers that I can find referred to the section in which Haines says on page 140 that a former chair of […]
Peter Gill Frank Cass, London, 1993 Academia’s a swine. Writing an essay on International Relations (the ideological version of Foreign Office ‘realism’) for my Politics MA, I managed to smuggle in a few references to actual politics — European Nuclear Nuclear Disarmament, the SNP, and ‘independence within Europe’, that kind of thing. Flushed with success, … Read more
[…] and from Hollywood films to literary novels, those seven seconds of mayhem in Dealey Plaza have been relentlessly examined for clues not just to a plot to kill the President, but to the hidden agenda of the last four decades of American history.’ A cute phrase, that: ‘seven seconds of mayhem.’ But, mayhem? I […]
[…] CIA. But the CIA played a crucial role in the second conspiracy – the cover-up. To return to the ‘big three’, Henze, author of The Plot to Kill the Pope was CIA station chief in Turkey. Ledeen, of the Georgetown Centre for Strategic and International Studies, and author of Grave New World, is a […]
