Climbing the Bookshelves

Lobster Issue

[…] well positioned will be disappointed, as they will be in seeking any sharp observations on British politics. Those who remember the Callaghan government and the rise of Thatcher may recall Williams and other Labour right-wing ministers vociferously rushing to the defence of one of their number, Reg Prentice, faced with deselection. Prentice subsequently switched […]

Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] well positioned will be disappointed, as they will be in seeking any sharp observations on British politics. Those who remember the Callaghan government and the rise of Thatcher may recall Williams and other Labour right-wing ministers vociferously rushing to the defence of one of their number, Reg Prentice, faced with deselection. Prentice subsequently switched […]

‘Nobody told us we could do this’

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] Rob Wilson MP points out that Clegg had – apparently – been a member of the Conservative Association at Cambridge University, and that he later worked for Thatcher cabinet member Sir Leon Brittain when Brittain was an EU Commissioner. It was clear, then, that Clegg might be more inclined than his predecessors to talk […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] politicians to get real. But politicians can’t ‘get real’ just yet. No mainstream British politician is willing to say that Britain is run down because (a) the Thatcher and New Labour administrations abandoned the manufacturing sector of the economy, and (b) the prosperous haven’t paid enough taxes for 40 years. For a while longer […]

Britannia Unchained, by Kwasi Kwarteng , Elizabeth Truss et al

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] per hour grew faster than France, Germany and even the United States. (pp. 8/9) What, things were better under John Major and Tony Blair than during the Thatcher years? You might think this would give our authors pause, but it doesn’t. It all seemed very different at the turn of the millennium. At the […]

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett and Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] Party election victories in 1970 and 1979, heralding a return to the market: the half-hearted version under Heath, ‘Selsdon man’, and then the real thing with Mrs Thatcher. As the delusions of the free marketeers crumble, so the history of the years in which these notions were dominant will be re-examined. And as the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] CIA role. He fuelled the Labour-is-run-by-theSoviets theme which led to the Wilson plots, the creation of Civil Contingencies Cadre in the late 1970s and, ultimately, to Mrs Thatcher and the disastrous adoption of the free market nonsense in the country. This perspective on Angleton is missing from the discussion. The only Brit present is […]

View from Bridge 88 copy

Lobster Issue

[…] on bankers’ bonuses? Broken-down Blighty In my local library book sale I picked up a copy of Dominic Sandbrook’s 2019 account of the early years of Mrs Thatcher, Who Dares Wins. Yes, the title is meant to evoke the SAS and the Iranian Embassy siege but it also represents Sandbrook’s view that Mrs T […]

L0b 92 Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] CIA role. He fuelled the Labour-is-run-by-theSoviets theme which led to the Wilson plots, the creation of Civil Contingencies Cadre in the late 1970s and, ultimately, to Mrs Thatcher and the disastrous adoption of the free market nonsense in the country. This perspective on Angleton is missing from the discussion. The only Brit present is […]

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