The Enemy Within Seamus Milne Verso, London, 1994 Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party Francis Beckett John Murray, London,1995 Seamus Milne has written a very good book, an essential book. Investigative journalism in this country is very hard to do, and Milne deserves great praise for this achievement.(1) The core … Read more
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
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
Policing London No 13 July/August Includes 6 pages on the miners, which compliments GLC report (see below); two page summary of recent police harassment of gays; summary of changes to date in Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. Still the best thing of its kind extant. £1 per issue: from Police Committee Support Unit (DG/PCS/602) County … Read more
Tom Nairn London: Verso, 2002, hb £13 I really like Tom Nairn. He is wonderful writer and this is a delight. If you’ve read Nairn all you need to know is that this is more of the same. But if you haven’t I’m not sure how to convey what he is about. This is … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
Where’s Ware? John Ware is one of the leading British TV journalists of our age. He has worked for World in Action and Panorama and is held in very high regard by his colleagues. Having produced a number of documentaries on the war in Northern Ireland he is now seen as an expert on the … Read more
The Imperial War Museum book of Modern Warfare: British and Commonwealth Forces at War 1945-2000 Edited by Major General Julian Thompson London: Pan Books, 2003, £8.99 This is the paperback edition of the book published by Sidgwick and Jackson a year ago. It contains 15 essays on conflicts that have involved British armed forces … Read more
The channels for US covert military aid to the Afghan mojahedin have been thrown into disarray by the death on August 17 [1988] of President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in an aircrash unexplained as we went to press. His death came at a particularly sensitive moment as the Soviet occupation forces prepared to withdraw and … Read more
Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic … Read more
