The Last Investigation, and, Deep Politics

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] These are facts: what people think they saw or heard is inherently, and demonstrably, unreliable. Hence the centrality of the wounds on the body in the legal mind — and hence, in Lifton’s view, the centrality to the assassination of the same ‘best evidence’. For Fonzi the moment of illumination was the realisation that […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

Wallace on Pincher on Wallace

Lobster Issue 21 (1991) £££

[…] my personal view of the named politicians was. It is, therefore, nothing short of disinformation for him to claim otherwise. p. 171 ‘Evidence of Wallace’s state of mind is contained in an essay ‘Ulster — a State of Subversion’, which he admits he wrote himself. His own conclusion was that….’ The ‘essay’ to which […]

Acid: the secret history of LSD

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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 […]

Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] were the other stories. Some were the horror stories with which we have become familiar: for example MK-Ultra and Ewen Cameron’s insane experiments with reprogramming the human mind which Hollings discusses. But also: by 1959 Cary Grant had taken LSD over 60 times as part of a Hollywood set who were using it with […]

The murder of Hilda Murrell: ten years on

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

Introduction Clear cut examples of political murder, or state assassination in the mainland UK have been virtually non-existent. It is that fact which has helped focus so much attention on the deaths of Hilda Murrell and, in Scotland, of Willie McRae. Lobster got into this area relatively early, printing in issue 16 a long report … Read more

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] organisations. Their members included aristocrats and prominent people in many countries. Their popularity reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment when the hold of Christianity on the European mind was weakening and being replaced with occultism and a fascination with antiquity. Educated men believed in a vague human brotherhood and tolerance, to be brought about […]

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