Benny Morris London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known … Read more
Is your journey really necessary? The Guardian ‘Weekend’ section of August 13, 1994, carried a piece called ‘The Seeds of Madness’, about Mark Purdey, the dairy farmer who has opposed the British agro-chemical industry, believing that the so-called ‘mad cow disease’, BSE, was the result of organo-phosphate poisoning. Life became complicated for him and the … Read more
JFK: The two Oswalds Anthony Frewin Those of you who missed the two articles by John Armstrong on ‘the two Oswalds’ in recent issues of Probe magazine, don’t despair: Armstrong has rewritten and considerably enlarged them as a two volume DTP work. Armstrong’s finding may be the most significant research breakthrough in years. But we’re … Read more
Mandy, The Independent and Europe As pictures of H’Angus the Monkey, the new elected mayor of Hartlepool, filled the news pages, it emerged more quietly that the other public face of that poor North-East town, Peter Mandelson, had joined the international advisory board of News and Media, the owners of The Independent and The Independent … Read more
Tim Rifat Century Books, London, 1999 £17.99 I was enormously disappointed to discover that this non-fiction book, which has printed on its cover, ‘The History and Science of Psychic Warfare and Spying’, not only lacks an index, it contains no meaningful references. Occasionally the reader comes across some scant footnotes; but the bulk of the … Read more
Editorially Writing in mid-January… good news is the arrival of The Digger, apparently set fair to replace Private Eye as the major outlet – major above ground outlet – for British parapolitics. (Lobster, as one British academic said to me, is ‘underground’…). The new Kincora-Blunt trail, opened up by Ken Livingstone in the House of … Read more
Corinne Souza Edinburgh/London: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/b This is an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has … Read more
The privatisation of part of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) has been generally reported as a financial scandal. More important is what it tells us about the politics of New Labour. There are two dimensions to this: first there is New Labour’s commitment to big business and in particular to … Read more
Barry Davies Bloomsbury, 1994, £14.99 The Lufthansa jet hi-jack and associated events of October 1977, of which this book purports to provide a first-hand account, have always worn a fulsome, fearful beard. This book leaves those events far from clean-shaven. What would help clear away quite a lot of the hair would be access to … Read more
Dave Renton Pluto, London, 1999, £9.99 This book has been touted in some areas as a radical, new contribution to the study of fascism; and it is certainly well-packaged and cheap. To start with the good points which, although few, are important: if you want to know who the current academic theorists on modern … Read more
