Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue

[…] read Climbing the Bookshelves by the former Labour Cabinet minister who helped launch the short-lived SDP in 1981. Sure enough the wise words I’d heard on the BBC were there. But so was her description of how as a 21-year-old Oxford student the then Shirley Catlin was funded by the US government to take […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer by David Blake Knox

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] was determined to clear my name and hoped for additional interest from journalists like David McKittrick. All was going well, with significant coverage, until McKittrick and a BBC journalist called John Ware wrote notorious articles on 2 September 1987 for the London Independent, containing proven falsehoods. They reinvigorated a smear, criticised by Duncan Campbell, […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] Together came from the Israel lobby in the UK. I wonder why. Not a million miles from which . . . as far as I can see BBC News, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times have not reported the arrest of Richard Medhurst and Sara Wilkinson under anti–terrorism legislation for their reporting […]

The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] describe Lockerbie in her memoirs, had wanted a more doughty foe than Dr Swire she’d have been hard put to find one. A former Army officer and BBC television engineer who then retrained as a general practitioner, Flora’s father was just the kind of honourable, hard-working and patriotic figure Thatcher told us was the […]

ATTACK WARNING RED! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] a localised radiation emergency in mind. There is no mention of a ‘wartime’ emergency. It’s as if the possibility of such an emergency no longer exists. The BBC reported that nuclear war is no longer on the UK’s ‘National Risk Register’6 – although the likelihood of a nuclear bomb being detonated by a terrorist […]

South of the border (occasional snippets from)

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] of 40 years! The shitshow continues Regular perusers of this column may recall my item from Lobster 78 on facial recognition.17 The 6th August report on the BBC news website that ‘Facial recognition tech mistook me for wanted man’18 informs us that the shitshow continues. Presumably, we are supposed to be comforted by the […]

GArrick Timmi text

Lobster Issue

[…] that, on the preponderance of evidence, Olaf Neitsch’s father was indeed a Stasi officer, even though that Stasi officer might not have been Herbert Neitsch. 10 11 BBC News, 15 January 2017. See . An academic study has analysed the degree of nepotism in the Stasi’s Karl-Marx-Stadt district office, where the above-mentioned Herbert Neitsch […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] fine imposed and the expenses incurred by the Telegraph dealing with the court case. Harebrained? ‘Page 8’ was a film written and directed by David Hare on BBC 2 on 28 August 2011, in which Bill Nighy played a suave, sophisticated senior MI5 officer who saves the Service from being being destroyed in a […]

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