Responsibilities, old boy The Big Breach Richard Tomlinson Cutting Edge, Edinburgh, 2000, £9.99 I found it hard to ‘see’ this because so much of its contents have been published in the media. There have been some changes – names altered – since the newspaper versions; and I am told that the original hardback version … 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
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
The Observer is a pale shadow of what it once was but it still has a lively Business section. Every fortnight Business carries a column from the American investigative journalist Greg Palast who is about as good as it gets these days on the interface between corporate interests and politicians. (1) In that Business section … Read more
I: Wilson, Cromer and the City One anniversary which has come and gone this year without much comment is the attempted 1968 ‘coup’ orchestrated by Cecil King against the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The plot was provoked by collapse of confidence in Wilson in the media (led by King’s Daily Mirror), finance, industry and … Read more
The Brittle Society Alarmists, like Naomi Wolf, have been exaggerating the degree to which the US, and by implication the UK, have been slipping towards a police state. The evidence for true tyranny in either country is weak. However, since it came to power in 1997, it might be reasonably argued(1) that New Labour has … Read more
BAP The Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines a bap as a ‘large soft bread roll’. How soft or hard the British American Project for the Successor Generation is — only time will tell. But it is certainly proving rather indigestible to the British media. By any standards a major story, Tom Easton’s piece on BAP (in … Read more
Feedback Re: the apparent post-war interrogation of Heinrich Muller and the purported German intercept of the Churchill-Roosevelt telephone conversation – in Lobster 35 pp. 20/21Chris Othen reports that the alleged intercept is taken from a book by Gregory Douglas, Gestapo Chief (R.J. Bender Publications, 1998). He writes: ‘This is one of those situations where the … Read more
Free Ride Department Meanwhile the Rand Corporation (that liberal think tank in Santa Monica which helps decide which Russian cities should be atom-bombed) has declared that the federal government must continue to support an obscure military satellite system known as Global Positioning Network. Much beloved by high-tech hikers and rental car enthusiasts, the GPS supposedly … Read more
