Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] book there are two comments about Cockburn. At a British Journalism Awards ceremony in 2015 someone said that ‘the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead’. The second is a quote from one of Sydney Blumenthal’s e-mails to Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, that […]

A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE
To access this content, you must subscribe to Lobster (click for details).

[PDF file]: […] Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. It is set in post–2020 UK, with a recognizable Boris […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] students.5 Among the luminaries are the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin, who is a Senior Visiting Fellow.6 His profile is light on any detail, especially his relationship with MI6. Enter ‘Coughlin’ into the search engine on Lobster’s home page and you’ll get the fuller drift. Many of the ex-spooks are quite open about their past […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll’ served as a distraction from political struggle and party discipline. To flesh out the theory, extra villains have been thrown in: Satanists, MI6, shrinks of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (whose Marxist musicologist, Theodor Adorno, is said to have secretly tutored […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] week-long sequence of events starting in late October. One, British Airways chairman Martin Broughton complains about the UK ‘kowtowing’ to the United States on airport security.1 Two, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers gives a lecture saying why his service should be excluded from general government cuts.2 Three, we have an international terror scare, with […]

And in 5th Place? The long march to Freeport UK

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] – getting as far as meeting Sir John Smith MP, Chair of the Trust. (In Douglas’s account of this meeting, Smith was ‘accompanied by two operatives from MI6’). It all ended in disarray, with it being made very clear that the Douglas/Webber offer was not being entertained. Subsequent to the meeting in the presence […]

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] days of Elizabeth I and Francis 17 18 Walsingham. This explains the continual presence of the present Queen in the background of many narratives concerning MI5 and MI6. It’s more than simply the ultimate loyalty of the two services to the head of state rather than to her government, it’s a matter of living […]

The meaning of subservience to America

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the integrity of your justiciary because the appeal papers prove Iran was involved….. I knew this information back then so you can rest assured both MI5 and MI6 knew.’ 6 Don’t you just love Baer’s notion that freeing al-Megrahi was about ‘protecting the integrity of judiciary’? As if it had any left!7 Subservience produces […]

Beaumont novel copy

Lobster Issue

[…] Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. It is set in post–2020 UK, with a recognizable Boris […]

Accessibility Toolbar