Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies Jim Schnabel Dell (USA) 1997, $5.99 Psychic Warrior David Morehouse Michael Joseph, London, 1996, £16.99 I approached the Jim Schnabel book with some caution. A number of people, including Armen Victorian, are intensely suspicious of Schnabel’s activities in the UFO/paranormal fields: some suspect him of … Read more
“What would they want with me?” Lord Mountbatten had imperiously said to his secretary shortly before his death…… (1) Ulster Unionist M.P. Enoch Powell suggested that the CIA were involved in the murder of Earl Mountbatten of Burma in August 1979…”The Mountbatten murder was a high-level ‘job’ not unconnected with the nuclear strategy of the … Read more
Just War: Psychology and Terrorism ed. Ron Roberts Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 2007, £20.00, p/b This is a curious collection in which a group of psychologists, with one exception all employed in higher education, try to get to grips with and form a response to the current Anglo-American ‘war on terror’. The responses vary. Two … Read more
Why is a Portuguese journalist writing a book about an almost unknown British spy? Recently I had to answer this same question from Igor Prelin, my favourite ex-KGB officer whom I first meet in Cannes, France, during the Television Market Fair of April 1994. After I met Igor Prelin in Cannes, I travelled to Moscow … Read more
I was born in a working class area of Leeds in September 1919. My parents were Quaker-ILPers and it was natural for me to gravitate to the labour movement. In 1934 I left school and joined the South Leeds Labour Party. The Labour League of Youth of the pre-war period had been heavily infiltrated by … Read more
Wensley Clarkson Blake Publishing, London 1998, £16.99 Remember Jonathan Moyle, the ex-RAF officer, editor of Defence Helicopter World, who was found dead, hanging in a wardrobe in his hotel room in Chile in 1990? This is about him – and about his death. It is done in the most irritating manner possible, written as a … Read more
The Gods that Failed How blind faith in markets has cost us our future Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson London: The Bodley Head, 2008, p/b, £12.99 This is E and A’s third book together. It was published just before the previous, June issue of Lobster.(1) Their first book, The Age of Insecurity (reviewed in Lobster … Read more
Crosland lives! Managing the World Economy John Mills MacMillan, London, 2000, £42.50 (hb) John Mills argues in this book that the central problem facing any economy is that of creating and sustaining growth. This is true not only for the older developed economies of the United States and Europe, including Britain, but also for … Read more
Philip Willan Constable, London, 1991, £20.00 Hats off. A British journalist, living in Italy, Willan has produced that synthesis of the Italian material on the “strategy of tension’ and related parapolitical activity which people like me, without Italian or access to the Italian press, have been waiting for. This is one of those books that … Read more
Lobster’s writers say farewell (in approximately 250 words or less) In alphabetical order: Richard Alexander: Good riddance. Dan Atkinson: Prediction is a mug’s game, but here is one forecast for the early, troubled years of the next decade: Tony Blair’s ten years in power will be widely seen as a golden age of cheap consumer … Read more
