Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££
CIA: read all about it The most striking intelligence story since the last issue was Tim Spicer’s ‘CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US’.(1) It included this: ‘A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of ten CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the … Read more
Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
Alien Liaison Timothy Good Century, London, 1991 Please note: all the telephone conversations referred to by the author in this essay have been tape-recorded. Published in May 1991, the thesis in Good’s book is (a) that alien space craft have landed and/or crashed on earth; and (b) that the U.S. government is concealing this fact … Read more
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££
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
Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££
The Enemy Within Seamus Milne Verso, London, 1994 Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party Francis Beckett John Murray, London,1995 Seamus Milne has written a very good book, an essential book. Investigative journalism in this country is very hard to do, and Milne deserves great praise for this achievement.(1) The core … Read more
Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££
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
Lobster Issue 12 (1986) £££
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain … Read more
Lobster Issue 11 (April 1986) £££
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££
Most of a talk given at Housman’s bookshop in March. The talks in this book (1) kind of parallel some of the things that I have been writing about elsewhere. I began publishing Lobster in 1983; and I also joined the Labour Party that year, partly, I confess, because it seemed a likely source of … Read more