Pretexts

Book cover
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] seems unable to recognise that whilst Iraq does not present the challenges of a jungle topography, it does contain a human challenge more demanding. No amount of Agent Orange and puppet regime change will make the Islamic undergrowth disappear; it will merely help to propagate a diffuse but deeply rooted resistance which Bush’s tough-talking […]

Who Owns Agca? Plots to Kill the Pope

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

The Time of The Assassins: The Inside Story of the Plot to Kill the Pope Claire Sterling, Angus and Robertson, London 1984 The Plot to Kill the Pope Paul B. Henze, Croom Helm, London 1984 These two books cover the same ground, more or less, and have the same thesis: the KGB used the Bulgarians, […]

Plotting for Peace and War

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] were abducted from Holland into Germany, is only mentioned in passing; and there is no reference to the simultaneous discussions between Max Hohenlohe and Malcolm Christie, an agent both for SIS and for Sir Robert Vansittart, despite the suggestive evidence that they might be connected.(3) Did Chamberlain back an attempt to assassinate Hitler, as […]

Acid: the secret history of LSD

Book cover
Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

David Black, Vision, London, 1998, £9.99 pb I enjoyed this book hugely, and I’d recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the politics of psychedelia – apart from anything else, there are stories here you almost certainly won’t have heard. However, overall it aspires to more than it can deliver. As the title implies, the … Read more

Clippings Digest

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

Phone-tapping Phone-tapping of CND (Observer 9 December 1984; Daily Telegraph 10 December.) Telegraph piece includes claim that people phoning CND office have been connected to Ministry of Defence and local police stations. Police Review (15 February 1985) quotes “a source inside British Telecom” on the question of warrants for taps: ‘When it is a police … Read more

Like books we should have so many witnesses?: Some recent JFK literature

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] so much the story of Nagell as materials for a study of him. The book’s 800-odd pages leave nothing out. A massive work. Nagell, a CIA contract agent, went into an El Paso bank in September 1963, fired a couple of shots into a wall, and got himself intentionally arrested — thus ensuring he […]

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America James Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, London and Yale, 1999, £19.95 The Haunted Wood: Soviet espionage in America – the Stalin era Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Random House, New York, 1999, $30.00 So now we know: most of what the Republican right in the US, … Read more

American Friends: the Anti-CND Groups

Lobster Issue 3 (1984) £££

American Friends: the Anti-CND Groups Steve Dorril In a memo leaked to the Washington Post (9th May 1982) on opposition to President Reagan’s defence policy, Eugene V. Rostow, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, stated “there is participation on an increasing scale in the US of three groups whose potential impact should be … Read more

Economic Fundamentalism: a Laboratory Experiment

Book cover
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional … Read more

Accessibility Toolbar