Extracts from the memoirs of the late General Fardust on the Iranian Pahlavi dynasty, published in 1978. Translated from the Farsi and introduced by Armen Victorian. Hossein Fardust was perhaps the closest person to the late Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. They went to school together and Fardust became the Shah’s closest friend — … Read more
Introduction The British press is pretty feeble, and much of the problem begins with its cosy relationship with the British state. At the heart of that relationship is the ‘lobby system’, that peculiar British institution formed to allow the state and its political mouthpieces to lie to the media off the record. The document reproduced … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
Britannia’s Burden: the Political Evolution of Modern Britain 1951-1990 Bernard Porter Edward Arnold, London, 1994. Bernard Porter’s latest is a Marxist text-book. However it is Marxism with a difference. There is no happy ending nor even the promise of one. The argument is serious and absorbing. It does not observe the normal conventions of blandness … Read more
