Daniel Ellsberg New York: Viking, 2003 Colin Challen MP The timely publication of Ellsberg’s memoir shows that from the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident to the Arabian Gulf in 2003, little seems to have changed in the United States’ approach to starting war. Ellsberg’s account of secret White House activity in the wake of the Tonkin … Read more
The Economic League Labour Research (April 1988) have produced a written version of the essential content of the two World in Action programmes on it, with current personnel and the names of some 350 British companies which have funded the EL since 1972. In line with the thesis suggested by White in his essay (see … Read more
The Spy who came in from the Co-op David Burke Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The author was conducting a series of interviews with 87-year old Melita Norwood about her childhood among a group of pro-Soviet radical exiles in England in the 1920s and 30s, when it was revealed in the press, via … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
HP source ‘The plot against Harold Wilson’, the drama-documentary broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 March, was a strange affair. It was really little more than a World in Action half hour from the late 1970s puffed-up, complete with redundant reconstruction of Wilson and Marcia Falkender meeting BBC journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt). Is the … Read more
