U.S. President Bill Clinton has made a number of public references to the impresssion made on him as a young student by Professor Carroll Quigley. (1) As Lobster readers will know, Quigley was the author of Tragedy and Hope (U.S., MacMillan, 1966) in which he described for the first time the role of the Round … Read more
23. Book Review. The Round Table The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes To Cliveden Carroll Quigley (Books in Focus, New York 1981) This, I think, is the most important book ever written about the British ruling class and its foreign policy. In outline Quigley has rewritten the political and diplomatic history of Britain (and thus some … Read more
Miscarriage of justice campaigners say that they are being subjected to serious harassment and intimidation. At a House of Commons meeting, campaigners described their experiences. The meeting, on September 17 2003, was chaired by John McDonnell MP, and included speakers involved with high profile campaigns. Kevin McMahon, of Merseyside Against Injustice, joined the Merseyside Police … Read more
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006 If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney’s conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that … Read more
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Clairview, East Sussex: 2003, p/back, £11.95 It is, perhaps, unfair to review a current affairs book, a year or so after its initial publication. In this age of the Internet and the speed at which information is passed between people and continents, what chance does any book stand of still being … Read more
David Aaronovitch London: Jonathan Cape, £17.99, h/b In his introduction Aaronovitch tells us he became interested in conspiracy theories when someone he was working with introduced him to the they-didn’t-go-to-the-moon theory; and this offended his ‘sense of plausibility’ He’s right: we all have a kind of plausibility threshold, beyond which a proposition about the world … Read more
Police use of computers Unreported in the daily papers in this country, Merseyside County Council recently decided to refuse the funding for Merseyside Police’s criminal intelligence computer. (Detailed account in Computing 13th September 1984) This is the most significant step to date in the struggle to get some kind of control established over policing methods. … Read more
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
On 1 January 2005 several new laws and regulations governing access to information come into force: the Freedom of Information Act 2000, covering England, Wales and N. Ireland; the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002; new Environmental Information Regulations 2004/5; Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004; and an extension of the Data Protection Act 1998 to … Read more
