Historical Notes: Blair and Gladstone

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] the banks another £46 million: the public finances were running out of cash. (2) At this point alarm bells rang in London and Paris. In 1875 the Conservative administration of Benjamin Disraeli used the crisis to buy the Khedive’s shares in the newly built Suez Canal. In 1876 Egypt was forced to accept a […]

JFK bits and pieces

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

JFK bits and pieces Paul Hoch recommends JFK:The Book of the Film (Applause Books, 211 West 71 St NY, NY 10023). This contains a footnoted JFK screenplay and about 350 pages of published articles, including some of the best anti-Stone stories. The final badge of honour was bestowed upon Stone’s movie by a long, ludicrous … Read more

Enemies Within?

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] British state and Thatcherism in 1984/5 and lost. (Beckett suggests that the CPGB leadership did not want this show-down.) After 1974 and the Saltley depot event, the Conservative Party and the British state prepared not to be defeated ever again: the miners and the British Left in general did nothing. Like other generals before […]

The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism

Book cover
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] from them. He sees the current situation as the outcome of struggle between factions of the American ruling class, between what he calls neo-liberal multilateralism and neo- conservative unilateralism. The multilateralists were exemplified by the Trilateral Commission who, in the 1970s, during Jimmy Carter’s term, had a go at creating a – here comes […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] increasingly right-wing London Evening Standard who was a recent participant in a New Atlantic Initiative (below) conference organised by Richard Perle’s American Enterprise Institute. Gove is the Conservative columnist at The Times much seen in TV studios pressing the war case. Pollard is a former Fabian Society official, a joint author with No 10 […]

Morningside Mata Haris: How MI6 deceived Scotland’s great and good

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] ‘Morningside Mata Haris’, Morningside is an upper-crust area in Edinburgh famous – in Scotland, any way – for having a distinctive accent, posh Edinburgh. Malcolm Rifkind, erstwhile Conservative Foreign Minister, is an example of it. Elma Dangerfield and the Duchess of Atholl don’t seem to have had much to do with Morningside and were […]

A short history of Lobster

Lobster Issue

[…] Steve, and, in publishing it, we breached the Official Secrets Act in a big way. But apart from being denounced in the House of Commons by a Conservative MP – who was among those listed – nothing happened. Evidently the British state had learned the lesson that prosecution merely makes those prosecuted the subject […]

Defector Politics: or, grooving with Mr G.

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] presence of the Labour MP Allan Rogers on the new Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. They quote examples of his support for left-wing causes taken from the Conservative Party’s 1992 Who’s Left: An index of Labour MP’s and Left-wing causes 1985-1992 (which Julian Lewis had a hand in compiling). Mr Rogers comes in about […]

Lying about Iraq

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

NB This issue of Lobster went to the printer in late May. At that stage no Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been found by the ‘coalition’ forces. Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on … Read more

Confessions of a Crawler

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 1 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Pan Books, 1998, £7.99 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 2 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan, 1999, £25 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 3 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan 2000, £25 Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries are quite remarkable. Any normal persons would have tried … Read more

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