A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] although important, role. In the end, Blair lacked the nerve to call a vote. Mr Turner is acute in his observations of the Labour leader: ‘Unlike Bill Clinton, he was not a charismatic figure, but had learnt the trick of behaving as if he were.’ As for comparisons between Blair and Thatcher, there was […]

Misc reviews

Lobster Issue

Misc reviews These reviews of mine were written for other publications. Robin Ramsay Who killed Dag Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War and white supremacy in Africa Susan Williams London: Hurst and Company, 2011, £20.00, h/b. After travelling thousands of miles, visiting many libraries and archives, interviewing the surviving eyewitnesses and reexamining the previous inquiries, […]

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

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019)

[PDF file]: […] was accepted by almost 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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] dough One of the central threads of the original QAnon nonsense was that senior figures in the US Democratic Party in Washington (including then presidential candidate Hilary Clinton, obviously) were part of a paedophile network in the 5 US and that it was this network which really ran America. The idea of a paedophile […]

The rise of New Labour

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] no interest in the economy – as far as I know, he had no economic knowledge at all – and left it all to Brown. Copying the Clinton Democrats of the 1990s, Brown believed that Britain’s future lay in the financial services, the so-called knowledge economy and immigrants who would do the shitwork the […]

2011: a Reagan odyssey

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] very president since Reagan has been obliged to follow the tone set by the country’s terrorist-in-chief. George Bush Sr and George W Bush as well as William Clinton were integral parts of the Reagan tradition – liberal fantasies to the contrary not withstanding. In 2008, the ultimate synthetic president was elected, Barack Obama, a […]

Garrick 1-6 this one

Lobster Issue

[…] election campaign for his first term had begun, Stone registered a donation-seeking website called StoptheSteal.org and used it to pump out claims that Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton would cheat to win the election if the results looked too close to call. Which was exactly what George W. Bush had been accused of doing […]

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: The great charlatan My Life, Our Times Gordon Brown The Bodley Head, 2017, £25, h/b John Newsinger There were never any fundamental policy differences between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Both men accepted that the world was completely dominated by the super rich and that government in the modern world had to serve their interests: […]

The Dispossessed: The Working Classes and their Instinct for Survival by Christophe Guilluy

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: The Dispossessed The Working Classes and their Instinct for Survival Christophe Guilluy Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025, p/b, £15 (approx.) Simon Matthews This slim volume, 133 pages, is by a French geographer,1 who has developed a theory of ‘peripheral France’. He comments on the growth in holiday homes by the coast, and the use of properties […]

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