View from 92

Lobster Issue

[…] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a […]

Case Closed: The Identification of Rudolf Hess

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] I should have made my discovery known at once. The reason I did not was that I myself was then an Army officer and knew the military mind: any discovery I claimed to have made would have been quickly swept under the carpet and buried for another thirty years.’129 I took this advice to […]

lob84-view from the bridge (sept 84)

Lobster Issue

[…] records, the invocation of “the ‘Who shot John?’ angle” can only refer to one thing: Kennedy’s assassination. The ambush in Dallas was the first thing on Nixon’s mind as he pressed the director for the agency’s Bay of Pigs files. The president intuited a connection between the failed invasion in 1961 and JFK’s assassination […]

End Times: Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] to control, not just the future but also adjacent scholarly disciplines. As Theodor W Adorno wrote of philosophical systembuilders, this is a symptom of the ‘belly turned mind’. My riposte on Turchin’s behalf is that internal divisions amongst the US elites – described in depth in End Times and now playing out within the […]

South of the Border

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] interest a television news report by the BBC’s John Simpson on the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan. One part of that report has particularly stayed in my mind. For a brief moment in the video, sacks of currency – Simpson called them ‘bales of banknotes’ – were seen on the floor of a helicopter. […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. Check this I am not a lover of faction. I prefer my facts and my fiction distinct. I didn’t even read Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup. However I received an email from one […]

Reporting Trump

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] crowd to take up the chant of ‘Go home, Jim’ while he was live on TV. People ‘uttered the most horrible things that could possibly come to mind’. Nevertheless, he insists not all the crowd were so hostile with some coming up to him and apologising after the rally, some even wanting selfies. At […]

Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain by Phil Burton-Cartledge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] Interpretation’, Sociological Review, volume 3 (1910). 6 4 stock market and to changes in State pension levels. This can all make for considerable anxiety, a state of mind likely to be intensified by rapid shifts in the political, economic and social environment. What had been seen as the stable and unchanging values of the […]

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