Joseph K and the spooky launderette

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

From April to late June 1992, I spent some three months in a Dutch refugee camp, OC Zeewolde. I had applied for political asylum. The Dutch authorities had agreed immediately, to fully process the application. I gave them no reason for my application. The Bosnian war was beginning and the Dutch reception centres for refugees … Read more

The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

James McConnachie and Robin Tudge, London, New York: Rough Guide Ltd (Penguin Books), 2005, p/b £9.99 / $14.99 (US) / $22.99 (Can)   This chunky paperback is intended to give readers an introduction to the world of conspiracies and the theories around them, as opposed to works which discuss conspiracy theories as a topic in … Read more

Challenge to Democracy

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

Ronald McIntosh London: Politico’s, 2006   Some of us on the wrong side of 40 will have experienced a certain sinking feeling on our first encounter with this book, not least because of the misleading subtitle: ‘Politics, trade union power and economic failure in the 1970s’. All the signs suggest a reworking of the sort … Read more

Wizard: the life and times of Nikola Tesla

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

Marc Seifer Birch Lane Press, 1996. £15.95 (plus £2 postage) from Counter Productions, PO Box 556, London SE5 0RL. In the last 15-20 years the name Nikola Tesla has been one you bump against whilst navigating a mire of (often) unreliable books churned out on the unified field, free energy, HAARP electro-magnetics, and mind control. … Read more

The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners; GB84

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99   On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more

The Strange Case of Patrick Daly, MI5 agent

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

Pat Daly was the prime prosecution witness at the trial of two Irish National Liberation Army men at the Old Bailey in 1993. They were accused of conspiracy to steal explosives, conspiracy to cause explosions and possession of firearms with intent to endanger life. Daly lived in Bristol at Southmead from 1969 to 1989. Before … Read more

Briefly

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Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975 Mark Garnett (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) Dead Men Don’t Eat Lunch Geoffrey Gilson (self-published) Beyond Bullets Jules Boykoff’s AK Press, 2007: <www.akuk.com> Briefly Mark Garnett’s From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) has had some fairly sniffy reviews but I … Read more

A review of the (bad) reviews of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

It was very interesting being reviewed by the major media. While the left press – New Statesman, Tribune, Socialist et al – Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the non-metropolitan and Irish papers like it, we were slagged off by the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Independent; … Read more

Mind control etc

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

Someone pointed out to me that Lobster 42 ranged from Gladstone to UFOs, a spread probably unique today. But this range has a downside: things get picked up and then sidelined. One such area is the field bounded on one side by what is known as mind control and on the other by non-lethal technologies. … Read more

The Red Hand

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Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

Steve Bruce Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992: £7.99 Red-handed Just how difficult the ‘no collaboration’ line is to defend was illustrated by Colin Wallace in a long review of Steve Bruce’s book in the London Review of Books of 8 October 1992 (pp. 18-19). In it he ran through the major items of evidence against … Read more

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