The Myth of the SAS

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

Since the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980, the Special Air Service (SAS) has become a cultural phenomenon as much as a military one; has become, in the words of its former Director, Peter de la Billiere, ‘a living embodiment of the individualism of the British’. Their heroic exploits have … Read more

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] Still very much in the land of the living is an old political associate of both departed peers, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. A teasing thought crossed my mind during the phoney leadership war in the days before the Labour Party conference when Toynbee switched her allegiance to David Miliband from Gordon Brown. (We are […]

Historical Notes: Blair and Gladstone

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] which safeguarded the route to India. It was at this point that Britain’s Liberal government decided on intervention. It hoped for French support, which would, in Gladstone’s mind at least have helped to preserve some element of international respectability about the enterprise – but none was forthcoming. So a unilateral British invasion occurred. Arabi’s […]

The Case Against Israel, and, The Power of Israel

Book cover
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

The Case Against Israel Michael Neumann Oakland (US): CounterPunch, $15 Edinburgh (UK): AK Press, £10, 2005 The Power of Israel in the United States James Petras Atlanta and Black Point: Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006, $16.95   In a year in which Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza were accompanied by more stories of … Read more

Gone but not forgotten

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] of the Labour Party, a core position: can socialists be pro-nuclear? The cold-war warriors of Labour never attempted to develop a left foreign or defence policy, never mind a socialist one. Stewart remained firmly on the extreme right of the party on what were, for the Americans, key policy issues. He even went as […]

Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

Book cover
Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] that an effective analysis of the use of power “should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question who then has power and what has he in mind?” Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely investigated in its real and effective […]

Psi Spies

Book cover
Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] which I’ve read a couple, but also in Jim Schnabel’s 1997 Remote Viewers, which covers very similar ground to Marrs, and in a chapter in Armen Victorian’s Mind Controllers. Of the two book-length accounts I prefer Schnabel; but if that is no longer available, Marrs’ version of the material would do. For the basic […]

Crozier country: Free Agent: the unseen war 1941-1991

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more

UDA: Inside the heart of Loyalist terror

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack London: Penguin, 2004, £12.99, p/b   Henry McDonald’s highly readable recent book with Jim Cusack on the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is everything that other recent offerings on the subject were not. On the one hand, it avoids the kind of borderline homo-erotic sensationalism, in which the atrocities of self-serving … Read more

Accessibility Toolbar