Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] (George Robertson was selected and elected instead) and also declined Leith when a last minute vacancy arose in February 1979 (he was unable to make up his mind). The seat went instead to Ron Brown.9 With hindsight these were clearly significant miscalculations. Although Callaghan duly took Labour down to an arguably unnecessary defeat by […]

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 […]

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 […]

Did the Mossad steal John le Carré’s cunning plan?

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] by a German neo-Nazi intent on killing German Jews. Mrs Frank, now 63 and living in Shropshire, thinks the Drummer Girl–derived plan may have originated in the mind of her mentor, the British-born Israeli spymaster David Kimche, known in Israel for secret diplomacy as ‘the man with the suitcase’.9 The Hollywood version of The […]

The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] things would work, then he would try them and see. Failure would be down to the patient; success was his alone. What was his theory of the mind? (Though theory might dignify and elevate his thinking, such as it was.) It was quite simple and, shorn of psychiatric and psychoanalytic baggage, it is revealed […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] lot of research and was about to produce a report on how to rein in the City and support the domestic manufacturing economy, when Kinnock changed his mind in 1988, took the first steps towards accepting that there was no alternative to the established City-dominated economic system, and ignored the committee’s work. With the […]

Collapse of stout party: Eden, Suez and America

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] behest of the US and their local supporters? Have there been others? The general election of 1970 that resulted in a surprise Wilson defeat inevitably comes to mind. The US – and many within the UK’s intelligence and military – wanted Wilson out in 1970. The election that year was characterised by an extensive […]

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 […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] game to remember victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011. The state ideology and the folk religion sometimes overlapped subconsciously in the public mind, as in this splendid vignette from Mr Turner from shortly after the 1997 election : ‘Giles Radice was surprised to be visited at his constituency surgery […]

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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar