The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.’ Ambition Lord save us from people who just want to be the big I-am. We had Gordon Brown, who wanted to be the Big Yin. Gordon joined Labour and apparently was a socialist. Then he sniffed the wind and realised that he had to […]

Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy by Tim Milne

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] in the region, a good subject for an experienced and knowledgeable journalist with an 11 Milne pp. 208-9. 12 See Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files (London: Little, Brown, 1994) pp. 368-9. 13 Milne pp. 230-1, 235; Borovik (see note 12), p. 284 5 extensive network of well-placed contacts.14 Overall, his chief value to the […]

PERFIDIOUS ALBION: Britain and the Spanish Civil War

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] and short-term definition of those interests. A great deal of UK capital was bound up in Spanish manufacturing, notably in shipbuilding where Vickers, Armstrong Whitworth, and John Brown held 40% of the capital and provided 5% of the workforce for the company Sociedad Espanola de Construccion Naval. There were many similar examples in mining, […]

Deception in High Places: a history of bribery in Britain’s arms trade by Nicholas Gilby

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] business – in which ‘commissions’ are commonplace – but it has been for politicians, especially members of the Labour Party whose official ethos before messrs. Blair and Brown was something vaguely along the ‘merchants of death’ line. The Labour government of Harold Wilson solved that problem in 1966 by creating an insulation layer, the […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 91 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] territory. I’m telling you now, if you don’t get those squaddies off the roof, none of you will be coming to the Thursday night disco in your brown boots and mufti.19 The firing duly ceased. At the City Hotel, with some tuition by Stanley Bonnett, the international press had perfected a confidential system of […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] he’s down. . . … especially if that man is Boris Johnson. I have previously written of the similarities betwixt himself and the unlamented ‘accident prone’ George Brown, late of the 1960s Labour front bench. I have recently been taking advantage of the Netflix streaming service to work my way through the entire Monty […]

Murder in Cairo

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] in Naval Intelligence during the war and, under the pseudonym Richard Deacon, published nearly 60, often unreliable, books on 1 2 Harold Evans, My Paper Chase, (Little Brown, New York, 2009) 1 ‘controversial topics on which verifiable evidence was scarce’.3 A former telex operator related how he had been grilled by an MI6 officer […]

Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail by Abby Innes

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), University of Oxford; and Mark Blyth, Professor of International Economics at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Rhode Island, have all praised it.5 There is a summary of the book’s thesis on the LSE website6 and a pseudonymous review from a Scottish […]

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] everyone who mattered, politicians included. Tooze notes that it was the social democrats in the US and the UK, the ‘new’ Democrats (Clinton) and New Labour ( Brown and Blair), who took all this free market nonsense seriously and gave the money men their heads. ‘It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was now […]

View ffrom Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] that just after the election of the original NuLab, in 1997, I commented that Labour was led by three ‘not very bright Thatcherites’.43 One of them, Gordon Brown, is still talking about poverty here without betraying the slightest awareness that he had any role in this country’s economic decline.44 Hey Gordon, you were in […]

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