Ivor Crewe and Anthony King Oxford University Press, 1995, £25 Few who lived through the launch of the Social Democratic Party are likely to forget the impact of the creation of the Gang of Four in 1981. The avowed intention of the four former Cabinet ministers was to offer Britain a fresh alternative – a … Read more
Thinking about the Falklands Paul Johnson recently sneered in The Times at the ‘conspiracy theories’ about the Falklands War held by the likes of Tam Dalyell MP. Reading this, what struck me was just how few conspiracy theories about that war have emerged in the past 3 years. So, here are a couple. Mine is … Read more
[…] figure who happened to bump into Parsons and his colleagues with predictable consequences. He could have been a simple confidence trickster. Equally he could have been a spook ensuring that Parsons was (a) investigated at close range, (b) financially ruined and (c) eased out of rocket research. Or he could have been a combination […]
Richard M Bennett London: Virgin Books, 2003 £20 hardback This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: … Read more
Geoffrey Goodman London: Pluto Press, 2003 hb £18.99 As a conventional political memoir, this is quite an interesting read. The big figures march by: Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, Robert Maxwell; and there are interesting stories about all of them. The best anecdote has Denis Healey, as Chancellor in the House of Commons in 1976, … Read more
[…] on that subject. His latest piece of research on the Remote Viewing programme (p. 23) has massively broadened and thickened our knowledge of this fascinating piece of spook history. With another transatlantic missive from Brother Alex Cox, surveying the madhouse called America from his monastery cell in Venice, California, bits and pieces from me […]
Books Secret Contenders Melvin Beck (Sheridan Square Publications, US 1984) The CIA Christmas party of 1958 found 48 year old all-American boy, Melvin Beck, getting the offer of overseas work with Clandestine Services. He “struck like a hungry bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early … Read more
Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding London: Andre Deutsch, 2003, p/b £8.99 An updated and expanded version of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up … Read more
MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s In ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has been a […]
By Robin Ramsay See also: Lobster (magazine) at Wikipedia. Updated June 2022 The first issue of Lobster appeared in 1983. It was written by Stephen Dorril and myself. We met through the late Harry Irwin, who lived in Northern Ireland and was what Americans call a book scout: he bought and sold rare books. But … Read more
