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. […]

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 Gloucester Horror

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] at Halfpenny Green Airfield, Staffordshire. Thirty seconds after takeoff, witnesses saw the prince’s plane ‘drop out of the sky’ and explode on 8 It is to my mind plausible that the disease itself is the actual origin and ‘calling card’ of European royal houses (royals being jocularly known in Britain as having ‘blue blood’), […]

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 […]

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 […]

The liberal apocalypse; or understanding the 70s and 80s

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[PDF file]: […] always easy meat for the orthodoxy of the City.) What was inflation between 1945 and 1970, 2-4% per annum on average? Who, in his or her right mind, would not trade off 4% inflation for full employment and 2% growth? Vaisey’s vision Another version of the same basic perception that a great watershed had […]

Who really killed Chris Hani? by Chris Nicholson

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] past 40 years or so.4 He quotes a South African report from 1991 describing it as ‘an informal forum of influential representatives of a “conservative cast of mind“’ – which is what Pinay/Le Cercle was and remains. Among recent British participants are former Conservative MPs Norman Lamont, Rory Stewart and Jonathan Aitken.5 Three pages […]

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