The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2   If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more

Here, there and everywhere

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] of this book there are many raves; but continue on down through the second page and you come to a very destructive review by a former FBI agent, Delbert Hahn, who was interviewed by Hopsicker. Before buying this read that. Notes If the Zelig reference escapes you try On getaway styles, I prefer the […]

George Orwell and the IRD

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more

Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

William Massie With Chapman Pincher retired from the Express group of newspapers, somebody had to take up his position as the spooks’ number one outlet. That person appears to be one William Massie. His name has appeared on some interesting material recently: viz: 14th February 1988, front page story in the Sunday Express based on … Read more

Everything is going to change

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] a car whose registration was closed off by the FBI, was arrested by Chicago police who had strong intelligence connections. After Kennedy’s trip was cancelled, U.S. Treasury agent Abraham Bolden, who questioned the parallels with the situation in Dallas, was persecuted and eventually jailed. Meanwhile, two snipers had been arrested, and three more sought, […]

Israel’s Edwin Wilson

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] high technology found its way to Israel through Harari’s network. Harari’s main contact in the US is a figure often mentioned in the Contra investigations, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, who ran the secret Contra resupply effort from Ilopango airbase in El Salvador. Rodriguez’s close colleague on the Contra operation, the CIA’s Donald Gregg, […]

Recent JFK (and related) literature

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] of a President. HOSTY, James P., Jr. (with Thomas Hosty). Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. viii + 328 pps. Illustrated, index. Hosty, the Dallas FBI agent who destroyed a note from Lee Harvey Oswald on the orders of SAG Gordon Shanklin, here tells his story. Few surprises, good on FBI procedure and […]

A (very) brief history of Christian politics in the United States

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism … Read more

The Rape of Socialism

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] on politics around the end of the 19th century. He wanted to deal with the Greenwich explosion, used as the basis for Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, as well as the trials of the anarchists at Walsall and elsewhere. However, Harold Wilson’s administration did not want the repressive actions of a bygone age […]

The British Right

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

The Economic League Labour Research (April 1988) have produced a written version of the essential content of the two World in Action programmes on it, with current personnel and the names of some 350 British companies which have funded the EL since 1972. In line with the thesis suggested by White in his essay (see … Read more

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