Getting it right: the security agencies in modern society

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] magazine produced in Hull, England, came up. Don’t worry about Lobster, was the message, Lobster has been penetrated. That seemed absolutely hilarious to Hougan and me. Typical spook bullshit, we thought, claiming to have penetrated an organisation consisting of one man. We had a good laugh down the transatlantic phone line and I forgot […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

Mandy’s place in things On 12 June 1999 The News, Portugal’s weekly English-language paper, ran this comment on the Bilderberg meeting which had then just taken place in Portugal. The 47th Bilderberg Conference has come to an end. Members and one-off participants have departed as discreetly as they arrived. Lines of black limousines, unmarked except … Read more

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The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism

Book cover
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b   This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any … Read more

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Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British ‘microdot conspiracy’ had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick ‘Leapy’ Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of ‘Julie’, Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing … Read more

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Afterword: the search for “Maurice Bishop”

Lobster Issue 10 (1986) £££

See note (1) David Phillips, the former CIA officer considered by the Select Committee on Assassinations as a possible candidate for the true identity behind the cover name ‘”Maurice Bishop” -(2)- reacted strongly when this book was published in the summer of 1980. He contacted top executives in newspapers and television, making himself available to … Read more

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The aliens on the grassy knoll

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] are included in Geller’s section of The Geller Effect which he co-authored with Guy Lyon Playfair. (Jonathan Cape, London 1986; Grafton 1988, paperback) ‘Hey, Uri’, says the spook, ‘Let’s see if you can project an idea into President Jimmy Carter’s mind’. And worse. Though there is no evidence of Geller being a fake, there […]

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Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and Dissent

Book cover
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott … Read more

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A short history of Lobster

Lobster Issue

By Robin Ramsay See also: Lobster (magazine) at Wikipedia. Updated June 2022 The first issue of Lobster appeared in 1983. It was written by Stephen Dorril and myself. We met through the late Harry Irwin, who lived in Northern Ireland and was what Americans call a book scout: he bought and sold rare books. But … Read more

Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-60

Book review
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

Christopher Simpson, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994. This is the Simpson who wrote Blowback. This is hard to describe. From the cover blurb: the author demonstrates how the government-funded psychological warfare programs of the Cold War years under-wrote the academic studies that formed the basis for much of modern communication research.’ I … Read more

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Publications and Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

Books High Times: the life and times of Howard Marks David Leigh (London 1984) Howard Marks was – who knows? maybe still is – a major British dope dealer who got famous, not for importing huge quantities of dope (15 tons of grass in one venture) but because he became embroiled with MI6. Having said … Read more

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