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

Hacks, pols and PR

Book cover
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

The Triumph of the Political Class Peter Oborne London: Simon & Schuster, 2007, £18.99 Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy Edited by William Dinan and David Miller London: Pluto, 2007, £15.99 End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair CounterPunch and AK Press, Oakland … 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 […]

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 […]

Marching to the fault line: The 1984 miners’ strike and the death of industrial Britain

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] industrial trade union, led by CPGB members and ex-members, opposing government policy, was more than enough. The nonsense – the communist conspiracy theory – in Mrs Thatcher’s mind was of no relevance to MI5. But it surely is relevant to this story. Beckett and Hencke give us an expanded take on the received version […]

The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East

Book cover
Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] 1953. This is Fisk’s observation on that 1997 meeting at Woodhouse’s retirement home in Oxford: ‘The coup against Mossadeq, the return of the Shah, was, in Woodhouse’s mind, a holding operation, a postponement of history. There was also the little matter of the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum – which […]

Updating and Ongoing

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] ‘Application of Extremely Low Frequency Electromagentic Fields to Non-Lethal Weapons’. Anybody who has wondered why I have been running — however incompetently — the material on ELF, mind control etc. since Lobster 19, please note. This stuff is for real: potentially this is the biggest military technology development since the hydrogen bomb. Spooks bending […]

A Note on MRA, CIA and L. Ron. Hubbard

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

A Note on MRA, CIA and L. Ron. Hubbard In response to my snippet in issue 38 (p.22) on Moral Rearmament and the CIA, Daniel Brandt (1) sent me the following from Miles Copeland’s, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s Original Political Operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989, pp. 176-177). This is a nice demonstration … Read more

Cloak and Dollar, and, Know Your Enemy

Book cover
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] behind US foreign policy…..was the defence of democracy’, is a joke. Or a lie. The ‘essential idea’ was to defend US economic and geopolitical interests and never mind how much (non-white) blood was spilt. It gets worse. I always look at the assassination of John Kennedy as a touchstone for academics writing about America […]

Accessibility Toolbar