On the jacket of his new book, reviewed in this issue, Steve Dorril writes there that he ‘is founder-editor of the widely respected journal’ Lobster. I invite you to look on the rear cover of this magazine and see who the editor is. That’s right: it’s not Steve Dorril. I have resisted going into detail … Read more
Clint Eastwood Movies Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood and to be released in Britain in December 2006, is an example of post-9-11 PR. It tells the story of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and has been described as the first film in which the balance of combat and public relations has … Read more
Mobile phones cause cancer, and other modern horror stories It appears that the facts about the medical hazards of electromagnetic fields and mobile phones and their masts are breaking into the mainstream consciousness in this country. Who now wants to live near a mobile phone mast? There are major protests all over the world about … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
The parapolitical activities of Jean Violet go back to the 1930s, when Violet was supposedly involved with a violent quasi-Masonic movement going under the title of the Comite Secret pour l’Action Revolutionnaire, or CSAR. CSAR was part of a larger far-right phenomenon in pre-WW2 France, the conspiratorial members of which were referred to as Cagoulards, … 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
by Peter Padfield Papermac, London, 1993, £12.99 There are now several versions of the Hess affair. One is the official story – a politician whose star is one the wane, attempts a spectacular comeback, fails, is locked up for forty years and finally commits suicide in despair. Another is the double theory, first outlined in … Read more
Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99 Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the lay … Read more
Kevin Danaher (ed.) Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, U.S., 2001, $15.95 www.commoncouragepress.com This volume contains 27 short essays by everyone from Fidel Castro (rather impressive, if he wrote it himself) through Chomsky, and Naomi Klein to Margot Smith, whose essay is titled ‘Granny Goes to Washington and Goes to Jail’. So: this runs from … Read more
Hess: A Tale of Two Murders Hugh Thomas Hodder and Stoughton, London 1988 This is an update of Thomas’ 1979, The Murder of Rudolf Hess. Thomas argues (a) that the ‘Hess’ in Spandau prison wasn’t Hess at all but a double; and (b) that both the real and false Hess were murdered. The first proposition … Read more
