Politics and Paranoia I wrote this for Picnic Publishing’s website. Talks, 1986-2004 Robin Ramsay Picnic Publishing, 297 pages, index, £9.99, ISBN 9780955610547 There are a number of talks in Politics and Paranoia about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. (Holroyd had been in the British Army Special Military Intelligence Unit and Wallace had been a Senior … Read more
De LAMBRAY Gay News (29th September 1983) carried a short article on Vikki De Lambray (formerly David Christian Lloyd-Gibbon), famous gay socialite, convicted High Society art thief, and apparent MI5 tempter/temptress. The article notes Lambray’s brief sexual relationship, in 1982, with Sir James Dunnett, former Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, and … Read more
Apartheid’s friends: The rise and fall of South Africa’s secret service James Sanders London: John Murray, 2006, £11.99, p/b This is a tremendously impressive piece of work; and it’s big: 395 pages of text, another 100 pages of notes and sources and a decent index. I imagine that most of it will be new … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
SIS is dead – you read it first in Lobster – but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, has been … Read more
Nicholas Bethell’s memoir Spies and Other Secrets (Viking, London, 1994) includes a curious section in which Bethell describes how in 1970, after he had been involved in the first publication of Solzhenitzen’s Cancer Ward in the West, he was attacked by a curious alliance of the left, Private Eye, and various people in and close … Read more
A Hack’s Progress Phillip Knightley Jonathan Cape, 1997, £17.99 This is a highly enjoyable and very well written memoir by one of our senior investigative journalists. As a young-Aussie-leaves-home-and-sees-the-world tale this is nearly as entertaining as the celebrated Clive James version (and with fewer forced jokes). Any journalist’s memoirs are welcome: it’s always interesting to … Read more
British ‘USP’ In September 2000 the tragic case of two infants from Malta dominated the headlines.(1) British judges were asked to decide whether it was ‘right’ for doctors to sacrifice one child, joined at the abdomen with her twin, for the sake of the other. As a result of global press coverage, the moral arguments … Read more
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
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies James Bamford, New York: Doubleday, 2004, h/back, $26.95 Ghost Wars: The Secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 Steve Coll New York: Penguin, 2004, h/back, $29.95 These books cover some of … Read more
