Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to achieve a rapid seizure of power in the name of the ‘National Will’, in senior ranks of the armed forces and sections of the security and intelligence services, on the Right of the Conservative Party, in business and financial circles and among sections of the media. The object seems to have been the […]

Anna Raccoon and the dawn of Savilisation

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Duncroft Approved School, an experimental secure boarding school near London Heathrow, opened by the Home Office to give a second chance of education to girls of above-average intelligence taken into care after breaking the law. The owner of the electronic archive was a retired English lawyer living in the Dordogne, who had herself lived […]

The Secret War Between the Wars MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s by Kevin Quinlan

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] handling of the very significant Tyler Kent/Right Club events which might have had a serious impact on WW2, delaying American entry; and the careful debriefing of Soviet intelligence defector Krivitsky, the first of its kind. Versions of these events, based on the same files, are in Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and had […]

British Counterinsurgency by John Newsinger

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] that disastrous campaign, we heard a fair bit of comment that the Americans should have listened to the Brits because the British state – its military and intelligence – is good at counterinsurgency.2 Newsinger’s account of British CI campaigns since 1945 shows that this is a delusion. With the exception of a couple of […]

The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the hacking trials themselves. We learn that Mulcaire’s early career was as a ‘tracer’ for John Boyall who, among other things, carried out contract work for the intelligence services. When the NOTW and Boyall fell out, Mulcaire was the beneficiary and became ever more deeply involved with obtaining material by assorted means in support […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

The writer with no hands by Matthew Alford

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] a movie and fucked the writer. Would a script get you killed? Alford’s earlier book about Hollywood describes an entertainment industry in which the US military and intelligence are thoroughly integrated, a system in which a really radical script simply wouldn’t get made. So who would bother to kill the writer when a word […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] coup to seize power for himself. He ‘did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking’ and, according to an interview with Col. Russell Thaden, the NATO intelligence chief, on one occasion he ‘blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan’. He calmed […]

Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] proposed rule changes. I am sure this exercise will have involved at some point party staff too, herding their constituency delegates in the right direction and sharing intelligence on the recalcitrant. Largely because of the lukewarm response from the trade unions, McSweeney didn’t get everything that he asked for, but the changes that were […]

The Conspiracy and Democracy Project

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] or impacts upon democracy. It might, for example, examine all the state conspiracies which now exist within this society; and since the armed forces, police, security and intelligence services (and the big corporations) are almost entirely unaccountable, such research would be entirely apt. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the […]

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