David Black London:Vision Paperbacks, 20001, £9.99 This a revised edition of the book which was reviewed in Lobster 35. I’m not sure how new it is. I no longer have the original edition but this seems pretty similar to it. What is new is some material on the activities of Steve Abrams, one of the … Read more
In 1953 Dr Drank Olsen, a scientist working for the CIA, was found dead on the pavement outside a New York hotel. The Agency instituted a cover-up of the circumstances of his death. The cover-up survived until 1975 when it was revealed that Olsen had been one of many people who had been unwittingly given … Read more
Richard J. Aldrich London: John Murray, 2001, £25 Another huge book, 645 pages of text and 70 pages of index, bibliographies and notes. How do you review something this size? I simply don’t know. Short of doing a London Review of Books-sized job and working through it chapter by chapter, all I can really … Read more
Kimberley Cornish London: Arrow, 1999, £7.99 On p. 86 of this enthralling book Kimberley Cornish invites readers to complete the following sentence: ‘Wittgenstein was offered the Chair in Philosophy at Lenin’s university [Kazan] in 1935 because…’ What possible reason can there be except that he was serving the Soviet regime? Cornish contends that Wittgenstein recruited … Read more
Pieces without an author’s name are by the editor Parish Notices For info/help with this issue, thanks to the usual suspects, especially Jane Affleck; and also to Paul Stott. Among the contributors to this issue Jonathan Bloch is co-author of British Intelligence and Covert Action and Global Intelligence and the World’s Secret Intelligence Services Today. … Read more
See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 3: British fascism 1983-6 (Lobster 25) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) Introduction In the first part of this essay, in Lobster 23, after reviewing the strategies adopted by significant British fascist parties in the period, … Read more
Introduction In January something very unusual happened in America: one of the major items of American parapolitics got aired in court. In the years following the events which led to Nixon’s resignation, there were many Watergate books, not least those written by the participants in the drama – Dean, Haldeman, Colson, Ehrlichman and Nixon himself. … Read more
Nicholas Davies Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1999, £14.99 It is by now clear to everyone, except the hard-line Unionists hankering after the restoration of a Protestant Ascendancy, that the Provisional IRA was defeated in its war against the British. Their defeat was certainly not total, so that no return to ‘the good old days’ of Stormont … Read more
the first book from the KGB archives John Costello and Oleg Tsarev Century, London, 1993 Yet another reheat of the interminable stew of Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean et al, this time spiced up with material from the KGB archives. Yes, the KGB archives. Five years ago, unimaginable. Today… today it certainly makes a striking contrast … Read more
Richard Keeble University of Luton Press, Luton, 1997, £14.95 Richard Keeble – a former journalist and now Course Director of the BA in Journalism degree at City University, London – makes his stance clear in the first chapter of this well researched study: There was no Gulf war of 1991…It was nothing less than a … Read more
