Are raw prawns pink? Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order … Read more
Last year, in the search for independent corroboration of some of Colin Wallace’s story, I talked to a number of ‘Irish hands’, journalists who had been in Northern Ireland while Wallace was working there. One was Kevin Dowling, the Sunday Mirror correspondent there from 1970-74. Dowling was reluctant to talk much about that period of … Read more
British Spies and Irish Rebels British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916-1945 Paul McMahon Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £30 First up, I have no specialist knowledge of this area, so if there any howlers in here, I’m unlikely to spot them. However, I know a good book when I see one. This has been … Read more
In October the US Government hired advertising doyenne Charlotte Beers as Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.(1) She intended ‘commissioning research into the Arab mentality’, confirming what we already knew: the American Government has so little respect for its many Arab/Muslim citizens, it has had to commission research into who they are. … Read more
As the election for the new Pope began a fascinating US radio interview with a former senior CIA official was broadcast in which the name Michael Ledeen (See Lobsters 31, 45, 47) came up in connection with the forged Niger uranium documents cited by both the US and UK governments in the build-up to the … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
The Stalker Affair Frank Doherty (Mercier Press, Cork, Ireland, 1986) The Genesis of Revolution James Kelly (Kelly-Kane, Dublin,1976) Frank Doherty, whose reports in the Dublin Phoenix and the Belfast Sunday News have frequently featured in Lobster, has uncovered a fascinating mass of information relating to covert cross-border operations by the Ulster security forces, and the … Read more
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Vincent Bugliosi New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2007 xlvi + 1612 pps. + CD-ROM End Notes and Source Notes (958 + 170 pps.). Illustrations, bibliography, index, $49.95. ‘Reclaiming History is important not just because it’s correct, though it is. It’s significant not just … Read more
Alwyn W. Turner London: Arum, 2008, h/b, £20 Punk monetarism The 15 years from 1969 to 1984 convulsed British society and pulverised its economy. By the end of this period, the post-war settlement, which had been assumed to last more or less indefinitely, was in ruins and the economic and social order we inhabit today … Read more
The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 1 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Pan Books, 1998, £7.99 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 2 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan, 1999, £25 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 3 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan 2000, £25 Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries are quite remarkable. Any normal persons would have tried … Read more
