Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££
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
Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££
The former deputy Labour leader of Preston has been given legal aid to sue the Inland Revenue, two chief constables, two former Tory government ministers, two millionaires and a former fish and chip shop owner, for conspiring to steal his tax records. Frank McGrath was swept out of power in a Labour Party purge after … Read more
Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££
W. H. Bowart, Self-published, Tucson, Arizona, 1994. Operation Mind Control was originally published in 1978 by Dell Paperbacks. It came out around the same time as John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a rather anodyne book which, after dealing with CIA and military LSD experiments which caused at least one unwitting victim to … Read more
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££
Melanie Phillips London: Gibson Square, 2007, £8.99, p/b This is rather interesting, though not entirely for the reasons the author intended. In the first half of the book Phillips describes how, after the British state lost control of and/or gave up control of its borders, a large (but unknown) number of Jihadist Muslim refugees … Read more
Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££
Next year will be the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory and the onset of the demented world as we know it in this country. No doubt books and TV programmes are being prepared. The most striking account of the first part of the Thatcher events is John Hoskyn’s Just In Time: inside … Read more
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
the first book from the KGB archives John Costello and Oleg Tsarev Century, London, 1993 Yet another reheat of the interminable stew of Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean et al, this time spiced up with material from the KGB archives. Yes, the KGB archives. Five years ago, unimaginable. Today… today it certainly makes a striking contrast … Read more
Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££
This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been … Read more
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££
Donald Allen During 1987, when some of the London media were pursuing the ‘Wilson plots’ story, Colin Wallace, the only public source on the story at the time, was working with a Channel 4 journalist called Robert Parker. At one point disinformation about Wallace was being fed to Parker, through another journalist, from a former … Read more
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££
CIA: read all about it The most striking intelligence story since the last issue was Tim Spicer’s ‘CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US’.(1) It included this: ‘A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of ten CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the … Read more
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££
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