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

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] here on 6 November – and the Democrats will do what they did last time: nothing. Which means the Republicans can steal the next one. Change of mind? Colin Challen MP reports that the index of Bill Clinton’s autobiography lists ‘Bilderberg conference’ at p. 376, where it does not appear; nor on adjoining pages; […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] were former members of the Communist Party or members of the Demos think tank. Names like Peter Mandelson, Stuart Hall, Martin Kettle and Martin Jacques spring to mind immediately What particularly interests me about Marshall’s book is its dissection of Christopher and Peter Hitchins’s politics and what it says about the absorption of former […]

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

Book reviews

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

Behind World Revolution: The Strange Career of Nesta H. Webster. Vol. 1 Richard Gilman, Insight Books, Ann Arbor (U.S.) 1982 As one of the major sources of the Jewish/Illuminati fantasies of the loony right on both sides of the Atlantic, Nesta Webster has a lot to answer for. Her books, it has to be said, … Read more

The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and post-war American hegemony

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

Giles Scott-Smith London: Routledge/PSA 2002, £55   This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded operation that ran for two decades after World War II of which Encounter magazine was the best-known British component. Giles Scott-Smith has added to the historical record well illuminated by Christopher … Read more

Combat 18 and MI5: some background notes

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] White Aryan Resistance against charges of state collaboration laid against them by Covington. Not having seen yet the primary sources to which the NSV report refers, my mind is still open on this episode. If their case against Covington here is correct, then his hurling of false accusations would be just the sort of […]

Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] I might take this as a claim that Britain’s security and intelligence institutions have been involved in assassinations (the attempts to get Nasser or Lumumba spring to mind). Paget’s reply to Fayed’s assertion is: ‘It is important to note in the Stevens (Northern Ireland) Report that the term “agents” is used to refer to […]

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

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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 […]

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