Classified: Secrecy and the state in modern Britain by Christopher Moran

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] story and the ABC trial in the 1970s; a detailed account of the hassles generated by the trickle of books which began in the early 1960s about intelligence during WW2, notably the Bletchley Park ‘ultra’ story; and the farcical events around Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. If the theme and the major incidents are familiar, much […]

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 […]

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 […]

Six Moments of Crisis: inside British foreign policy by Gill Bennett

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] levels, and though a ceiling was imposed on the size of the embassy in 1968 the Russians had side-stepped it by filling the Soviet Trade Delegation with intelligence officers and by making use of “working wives”.’ By 1971, MI5 estimated that of the near-1,000 Soviet officials (and wives) in the UK, a quarter were […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

[…] of them suggested giving Detective Caskey ‘false files’. He noted that ‘successive Police Ombudsmen reports have revealed such practices as ranging from the “slow waltz” of withholding intelligence from detectives or conducting sham interviews, or other efforts to disapply the rule of law to agents of the state. The obstruction of investigations through the […]

Newsinger on Strarmer

Lobster Issue

[…] being ‘woven together with some thin threads into a left-wing conspiracy theory in which Starmer is presented as an agent of the security state or even AngloAmerican intelligence organisations’. These are, he insists, ‘insidiously effective smears’. (p. 163) On the contrary, the argument that Starmer’s so-called ‘pragmatism’ lead to him wholeheartedly embracing the interests […]

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 […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

[…] of them suggested giving Detective Caskey ‘false files’. He noted that ‘successive Police Ombudsmen reports have revealed such practices as ranging from the “slow waltz” of withholding intelligence from detectives or conducting sham interviews, or other efforts to disapply the rule of law to agents of the state. The obstruction of investigations through the […]

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 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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