[…] Party. The Left in the Parliamentary Labour Party had lost interest in the subject, and though Neil Kinnock had shown a flicker of interest in the Peter Wright allegations, he had run for cover when Mrs. Thatcher challenged his patriotism. His successor, John Smith, was a life-long friend of the SIS officer, now Baroness […]
[…] of 1986-89, thousands of column inches, the major cause of our present increased understanding of the British spooks, is evaded with a brief reference to the Peter Wright interview with John Ware in which Wright recanted(1) – as if that’s all there was to it – and somehow he manages not to mention that […]
Never mind Peter Wright, he was obviously lying in Spycatcher anyway. Wallace is a vastly more important source: he doesn’t tell lies, for one thing; and he’s got bits of paper, evidence, some of which concerns his dealings with the late Airey Neave after he was thrown out of government service. At the time […]
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 […]
[…] H. Tawney. According to the scholar Erin Gill, who is researching Balfour’s life, she had sympathy for moderate forms of socialism and disliked the Fascist movement. Patrick Wright describes her as having ‘laundered’ the views of Famine in England, enabling the Soil Association to free itself from the far-Right taint of Viscount Lymington’s racialism.(17)What, […]
One Boggis-Rolfe or two? Philby: The Hidden Years Morris Riley Janus Publishing, London, 1999, £9.95 pb There are almost as many Philbys as there are readers. His current reputation is as thin as the biographies are fat. Is there room on the shelf for yet another Philby book? Perhaps for a slim one. Amidst legal […]
[…] is published, posing the big questions: ‘What Went Wrong with America?’ and ‘Where Are We Going?’ Fifty years ago at the height of the Cold War, C. Wright Mills contributed his masterpiece, The Power Elite, that documented the emergence of what would come to be called the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’, and inspired a whole generation […]
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 […]
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 […]
Parish Notices Thanks for material since the last Lobster to, Robin Whittaker (clipper-in-chief), Jane Affleck, Anthony Carew, Harry Irwin, Harlan Girard, Steve Wright and John Booth. Corrections I get surprisingly few anonymous or abusive letters but I got a corker after Lobster 34. The anonymous and abusive author pointed out that in my review […]
