“The anomaly of going to war in your own country was not lost on Harry.” (Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour, Fontana, London 1975) Airey Neave was killed in March 1979 by a bomb planted beneath his car just outside the Houses of Parliament. The then little known Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) soon claimed responsibility. The … Read more
Paul Routledge London: Fourth Estate, 2002, £16.99 In Lobster 39 (p. 23) I reported the snippet of information from a recent biography of James Callaghan that Mrs Thatcher, while leader of the Opposition, in 1977 had twice gone to to see Robert Armstrong, then Home Office liaison with MI5, to put the beliefs of her … 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
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
Al Martin Pray, Montana: National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American … 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
Daniele Ganser London: Frank Cass, 2005, £22.99, p/b Country by country the author has assembled what has been made public about the Gladio network since it was revealed in 1990. There are even 3 pages on the Gladio network in Luxembourg. Much of this is appearing in English for the first time and it … Read more
Crime fighting? There must many candidates for the title ‘The most damaging thing I have read about this government’. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, ‘A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit’ (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, … Read more
Nigel West London: Greenhill Books, 2006, £25, h/b The books of ‘West’ that I have read all have the same problem: he tells you that some of the material comes from past or present intelligence officers and hints that in those sections you are getting ‘the real inside story’. Somewhere along the way, for … Read more
