From: David Renton I am grateful to Lobster for printing Larry O’Hara’s review of my book. It is always a pleasure to see your ideas considered in detail. However, your reviewer devoted a great deal of energy to criticising an argument which he has not fully grasped, and I suspect that readers of this magazine … Read more
Iraq – fallout continues ‘Five years on from Hutton and we still haven’t been told the truth about the war based on lies’, fulminated Peter Oborne earlier this year. (1) Also less than happy was barrister Michael Shrimpton who unsuccessfully complained to Ofcom about an interview he gave for David Kelly: the conspiracy files, (2) … Read more
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
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
The Robert Henderson/Tony Blair story. Having failed to persuade any section of the British political class then in power to do anything about a wrong he had suffered at the hands of the media, Robert Henderson wrote letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair – 13 letters in all. This is Henderson’s … Read more
How MI6 and the CIA were involved in the death of Princess Diana Jon King and John Beveridge New York: SPI Books, 2002, £18.95 In the five years since the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul, interest in Diana herself may have waned, (1) but the circumstances surrounding her … Read more
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
In this article I amplify and update my account of the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul which appeared in Lobster 37. Since it was written there have been a number of interesting developments – the publication of Trevor Rees-Jones’ book; James Hewitt’s impromptu recreation of the fatal car … Read more
The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein, (Penguin 2007) X Films: true confessions of a radical filmmaker Alex Cox, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008 Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain Robert Protherough and John Pick, imprint-academic.com, ISBN 978-097645539 Guns for Hire Tony Geraghty, Piatkus, 2008 A Peoples History of American Empire: a … Read more
‘Everything is going to change’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters James W. Douglass Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008, h/b, $30.00 I am writing this immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, almost half a century after John Kennedy became the first, and thus far … Read more
