[…] present orientation of a group which used to be devoted to the propagation of (first) the Empire and then the Commonwealth. “In the longer sweep of his tory we have to understand that the basic supposition of our national policy towards the European mainland has been transformed since 1945. For four centuries we secured […]
Al Martin Pray, Montana: National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American … Read more
An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation David Edgerton Macmillan, London, 1991, £14.99. Short (130 pages), elegant assault on the thesis of ‘the declinist’ tendency in British history, now associated chiefly with Corelli Barnet and Martin Weiner, who have argued that science and technology failed to penetrate British (but essentially English) culture. By looking … Read more
Into the Dark Johnston Brown Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006, £22.99, h/b When Fred Holroyd first made his disclosures regarding the activities of SAS Captain Robert Nairac to Duncan Campbell of The New Statesman in 1984, they were credible because Holroyd was a loyal Army Intelligence Captain with absolutely no sympathies for IRA terrorism. … Read more
HP source ‘The plot against Harold Wilson’, the drama-documentary broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 March, was a strange affair. It was really little more than a World in Action half hour from the late 1970s puffed-up, complete with redundant reconstruction of Wilson and Marcia Falkender meeting BBC journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt). Is the … Read more
[…] how it was wrecked by the City’s lending explosion in 1972/3 – and on the protracted struggle between Lonrho, the Fayed brothers and various factions of the Tory Party over the ownership of Harrods. It also contains one of the best extended put-downs in recent years. This exquisite hatchet-job is on fellow Lonrho board […]
Cherie Blair: Speaking for Myself Cherie Blair London: Little, Brown, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The relentless harrying of Neil Kinnock by the Murdoch press at the time of the 1992 general election outraged Labour Party people, among them Cherie Blair. This was the general election when The Sun proudly boasted that it was its continual … Read more
Alwyn W. Turner London: Arum, 2008, h/b, £20 Punk monetarism The 15 years from 1969 to 1984 convulsed British society and pulverised its economy. By the end of this period, the post-war settlement, which had been assumed to last more or less indefinitely, was in ruins and the economic and social order we inhabit today … Read more
[…] report that Cox had attended the 2001 Bilderberg meeting. Off target Back in the 1970s the Army’s psy-ops unit in Northern Ireland once put out a s tory claiming that the IRA had hired American Vietnam vets to do its killing for them. (‘Paddy’ couldn’t really shoot straight was the subtext.) A new variation […]
[…] question? The same process is at work when it comes to photographs. Consider three relatively famous photographs. In 1964 the Daily Mirror published a photograph of the Tory peer Lord Boothby sitting near the gangster Ronnie Kray. The German magazine Stern used the photograph with a caption that noted that both men were homosexuals. […]
