Dangerous Men: the SAS and Popular Culture

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] heroes. This changed in the 1980s when the SAS found themselves enlisted as Thatcher’s Praetorian Guard, their exploits, both past and present, exploited as part of the Conservative Party’s ideological offensive against the post-1945 political and social settlement.’ (p. 3) He notes the ‘interesting cultural difference between Britain and the United States that there […]

The View from the Bridge: Blair. IMF. Bilderberg, etc

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] June 2000, he has been welcomed back into the ranks of the Pinay Circle and attended the June meeting of the Circle in Lisbon. Also present were Conservative MPs Michael Howard and Alan Duncan and Lord Cranbourne, leader of the Tories in the House of Lords. NATO and Kosovo The most surprising comments on […]

The fiction of the state: The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] editors’. A deafening silence In late fall of 2003, I went into New York to have a dinner meeting with Taki and Scott McConnell of The American Conservative to discuss my proposed article on Plimpton and the PR, to be titled, ‘An American In Paris’. () The article, a lean and to the point […]

Are spies useless? A Hack’s Progress

Book cover
Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

A Hack’s Progress Phillip Knightley Jonathan Cape, 1997, £17.99 This is a highly enjoyable and very well written memoir by one of our senior investigative journalists. As a young-Aussie-leaves-home-and-sees-the-world tale this is nearly as entertaining as the celebrated Clive James version (and with fewer forced jokes). Any journalist’s memoirs are welcome: it’s always interesting to … Read more

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] in 1992, that: ‘….by 1991 “Politically Correct” had become a buzzword to describe a phenomenon that was happening on U.S. campuses. Critics like Dinesh D’Souza, funded by conservative foundations and think tanks, helped popularize the concept.’ In the same essay Brandt noted how in 1975 at UCLA in Berkeley, ‘These feminists were all cruising […]

My enemy’s enemy…: Museum Street

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] Sutch. There was the Moyle affair in which a police report about Colin Moyle’s nocturnal activities on the streets of Wellington somehow got into the hands of Conservative leader Muldoon. There was the “Think tank’ affair, in which the newspaper Truth concocted a conspiracy fantasy in which Labour was going to nationalise all the […]

Disinformation: From Euros to UFOs

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] and on the Euro in the lead-up to the European elections. Crucially, senior staff at the BBC managed the news to such an extent that the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, which received just 1% of the popular vote, received infinitely more coverage than did my Party, which achieved 8% of the vote. Yet, when we […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

NFTB There is a new issue, no 6, of Larry O’Hara’s Notes from the Borderland. It is 68 pages, glossy paper, with essays on ‘journo-cops’, Paul Foot, Shayler and Machon and the Copeland bombing. In the UK this is £3.50 from BM 4769, London WC1N 3XX; a two issue sub is £7.50. Outside the UK: … Read more

A note on the British deployment of nuclear weapons in crises – with particular reference to the Falklands and Gulf Wars and the purchase of Trident

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] the story has been subject to some ridicule by some sectors of the defence establishment. Tam Dalyell’s initial source, shortly after the Falklands War, was a senior Conservative back-bench MP with an interest in defence matters and close links with the Ministry of Defence, and who later held ministerial office. Tam later had it […]

Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] Brown’s economics advisor, and former SIS officer Baroness Ramsay.(9) Only in forelock-tugging Britain would a former intelligence officer be appointed to a (nominal) oversight committee. From the Conservative Party there is former Northern Ireland junior minister Michael Mates (Colonel, rtd.), and Tom King, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and former Minister of […]

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