Spectre In the last Lobster 35 I reported on the new anti-EU magazine Spectre and wondered about its political orientation. In response, the editor, Steve McGiffen, sent an exemplary piece of candour from which here are some extracts. ‘….. Our original statement, sent out very widely, made it clear that we are minimalist to 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
The Oyston Affair appears to have been the longest and most expensive privately-funded political dirty tricks campaign in recent British history. The astonishing 15-year campaign waged against Owen Oyston by Michael Murrin, the owner of a fish and chip shop in the village of Longridge, Lancs, was backed by help and cash payments raised by … Read more
Ideas and Think Tanks in Contemporary Britain: Volume 1 edited by Michael David Kandiah and Anthony Seldon Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1996 £29.50 As the title suggests this really contains two separate though not unrelated areas. The first is a series of shortish essays about so-called think tanks in the UK which follow on from … Read more
Robin Ramsay is the co-founder of Lobster and the current editor. For contact details click here. Books by Robin Ramsay Politics and Paranoia (Hove: Picnic Publishing, 2008) Who Shot JFK? (2002) The Rise of New Labour (2002) Conspiracy Theories: Almost Everything You Need to Know in One Essential Guide (2000) Smear! Wilson and the Secret … Read more
Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding Andre Deutsch, London, 1999 £17.99 At one level this whole Shayler affair is quite odd. For Shayler is the quintessential, contemporary, football-mad, New Labour-oriented, a-political technocrat – someone who can use the word ‘modern’ without blushing and putting it in scare quotes. (Shayler’s complaints about MI5 can be seen in … Read more
Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
Dick Russell Carroll and Graf, New York, 1992 This is one of the most interesting JFK assassination books to have emerged from the movie and 30th anniversary tie-in crop. Given the vast amount of attention paid to Gerald Posner’s ‘Oswald did it after all!’ apologia, Case Closed, it is unfortunate that Russell’s book still hasn’t … Read more
