This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been … Read more
Before he went on the run, in the wake of Ernie Elliot’s murder in 1972, former British soldier and UDA member David Fogel gave an interview to the London Times.(1) In it he denounced sectarianism and said that he hoped that one day ‘the Official IRA and the UDA would work together, because both organisations … Read more
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a … Read more
C. Gordon Tether Mike Peters in Lobster 32 mentioned a book – actually, a pamphlet – called The Banned Articles of C. Gordon Tether (ISBN 0905821009) in which Tether had published those items written for his Financial Times column which the editor had seen fit to pull. Not having looked at it for about a … Read more
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more
More, please In an account of his career as a writer of spy fiction (Guardian 16 November ’89) John Le Carré referred to the hostile reaction received by his (unnamed) second book, presumably The Looking Glass War: ‘Critics and public alike rejected the novel, but this time the spies were cross. And since the British … Read more
Alien Liaison Timothy Good Century, London, 1991 Please note: all the telephone conversations referred to by the author in this essay have been tape-recorded. Published in May 1991, the thesis in Good’s book is (a) that alien space craft have landed and/or crashed on earth; and (b) that the U.S. government is concealing this fact … Read more
Charles F. Reske Alpha Publications, Sharon Center, Ohio, USA. For Vietnam War buffs — and no particular political persuasion is necessary to be fascinated by the surreal, epic quality of that conflict — the holiest of holies is probably the Special Operations Group (SOG). One of the most shadowy organizations ever formed by the Pentagon, … Read more
Robin Bryans Honeyford Press 58 Argyle Road, London W13 8AA, £9.75 Another slice from the memories of Robin Bryans. (The first volume was reviewed in’ Lobster 24.) An extraordinary cavalcade of names, faces and odd events. If you liked volume 1, you’ll like this. While I was keyboarding this I opened the book at random … Read more
Notes From the Borderland Larry O’Hara now has his own journal, Notes from the Borderland, the first issue of which appeared in November last year. Like his previous pamphlets, this is full of fascinating information on the far right – the guts of the lead article on a charity scam being run in the UK … Read more
