David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, £17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn’t read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts […]
Ben Pimlott Harper Collins, London 1992, £20 At one level, this deserves the plaudits it has received. It is a belting good read, such a good read, in fact, that I had got as far as 1967 before I realized that there was no mention of Lord Cromer, the Governor of the Bank of England […]
[…] deep into the heart of the Blair project and into the history of its precursors. Follow Draper, the Labour student initially offered work by Agriculture Minister Nick Brown and then taken up by Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson, and we get a few insights into New Labour of the ‘stuffing my bank account […]
[…] the two men became friends. (4) A month later the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, died, and Blair won the leadership election contest with Gordon Brown – in some accounts with financial assistance from Levy. (5) All accounts are agreed that Michael Levy then set about raising money – the figure of […]
[…] the Skull and Bones was Prescott Bush Snr., father of the first President Bush. A scion of New York’s financial establishment, Prescott Bush was a director of Brown Brothers Harriman & Company, the oldest private bank in the United States. He was also a director of the Union Banking Corporation, a bank set up […]
[…] much of his behaviour was irrational. He was often beyond reason with everybody, including friends, except for an extremely tight and trusted inner circle, people like George Brown of Brown and Root, and the members of the 8F group, a cabal of politicians and businessmen which ran some of Texas in the 1950s and […]
[…] public transport as an organised, planned and publicly owned endeavour. And the man himself? Agreeing (in a restaurant in Islington in 1994) that another person – Gordon Brown – would effectively be the real prime minister wielding huge power over all government policy and strategy whilst Blair concentrated on a presentational, presidential role. Scott […]
[…] letter to the Bank of England in May 1997, ‘The new monetary policy framework’, announcing the formation of the MPC and setting out its terms of reference, Brown referred to Labour’s manifesto commitment that they would ‘ensure that decision-making on monetary policy is more effective, open, accountable and free from short-term political manipulation‘. (emphasis […]
[…] doesn’t mention Loy Factor around whom the book is built. On p.812 Armstrong tells us: ‘Some researchers speculate that the man wearing the horn-rimmed glasses and the brown coat may have been Lyndon Johnson’s associate Mac Wallace whose fingerprint may have been found on one of the boxes near the window…’ . On p.375 […]
‘You don’t investigate people for why they think but for what they do.’ – former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti (1) Introduction If nothing else, the Iran-Contra scandal temporarily illuminated the extent to which ostensibly private organizations have been helping secretive elements within the American government — in this case the core of the executive branch’s … Read more
