Plotting for Peace and War

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] its Empire intact while simultaneously allowing Hitler to proceed on his crusade against the real enemy, the USSR. This defeatism was encouraged by powerful sections of the Conservative Party, the City, industry and the Royal Family, all of whom were disposed on ideological and/or racist grounds to take a favourable view of Nazism. So […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

A spook, moi? One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow … Read more

Alastair Campbell (Book review)

Book cover
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] up a large fund to enable ordinary citizens to sue newspapers; or introduced a Right of Reply Act. Etc etc. In the event they did nothing. The conservative nature of the British media became the cover story for their own conservative beliefs. A member of the Labour Party for tribal rather than political reasons, […]

Listen, Marxist

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] another vicious attack on a Catholic. Campbell and Longstaff were both defended at their trials by Donald Findlay QC, Scottish Barrister, Dean of St Andrews University, leading Conservative, and who himself was caught on video giving a fine rendition of the Protestant anthem ‘The Sash’ at a post-match piss-up at Glasgow Rangers’ ground, Ibrox. […]

MI5: New Threats for Old? Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] given the absence of a real subversive threat in CND which would provide a legitimate excuse for penetration and surveillance, and unwilling to tell this to its Conservative political masters, MI5 did simply fabricate a communist/subversive role CND didn’t deserve. However, assuming that MI5 will simply fabricate a ‘new threat’ to keep themselves in […]

Willy Brandt: the “Good German”

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] Brandt was an emigre and therefore suspect in many eyes. This was used in 1961 when, in one of the dirtiest political campaigns in post-war Germany, the conservative CDU/CSU parties called Brandt “a traitor to the fatherland”. Nazi propaganda that emigres were untrustworthy had a lasting effect. This unease even extended into the West’s […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more

Watergate revisited: Hougan’s ‘Secret Agenda’

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

Watergate revisited: Hougan’s Secret Agenda Introduction No apologies for returning to Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. As Steve Dorril said in Lobster 8, this is a major event. This essay is in two parts. In the first I make some critical remarks about Secret Agenda’s central theses; In the second I speculate about other items on […]

The Pinay Circle

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] English and this may explain what appear to be errors. The Pinay Circle is an informal group which meets twice a year in different locations. It includes conservative and anti-communist politicians, journalists, bankers etc., and occasional guests, all of whom originally gravitated around former French President Pinay. A meeting took place at the Madison […]

Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism

Book cover
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] son, Nicholas, this always rankled: he ‘had seen little active combat, and this played on his mind’. His subsequent entry into the House of Commons as a Conservative MP owed considerably less to his war record than it did to his affairs with the wives of prominent Tories and the connections and contacts this […]

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