Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom by John Strafford

Lobster Issue

[…] Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor at the time of the Iraq invasion, told him ‘that whatever the size of the march the Government would not have changed its mind.’ Which is what we all suspected anyway. Tony Blair, Dubya’s political catamite, knew what was expected of him and was determined to deliver it. 199 Summer […]

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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. Unbecoming American Dr T. P. Wilkinson wrote a dozen or so striking essays for Lobster. Some of them are included in a collection of his essays, Unbecoming American: A War Memoir, available from Amazon.1 […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA David Black Is History a fiction? In his best-seller of 1991, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, the late John Bossy claimed that Bruno spied for Queen Elizabeth’s enforcer, Sir Francis Walsingham, at the French embassy in London. This was a […]

Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] us this about Sarah Brown and the spin doctors, Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan: ‘The demure public image was the front of a woman with a steely mind who was fiercely protective of her husband and family. She formed a strong, and to some at No 10 surprising, alliance with Damian McBride and Charlie […]

Divine Rascal: On the Trail of LSD’s Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead by Andy Roberts

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] and if he did, in what capacity. The evidence here isn’t overwhelming, but on balance one would conclude he did. The most likely explanation that comes to mind is that his well above average intelligence was noted in the RAF. He was taught Danish and Norwegian and posted, after formal discharge, to Copenhagen where […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* The times they might be a-changin’ One day in July I was reading ‘CIA has a long history of empowering monsters’ by the editor of Covert Action Magazine, Jeremy Kuzmarov. True, of course, […]

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