I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] about Spanish history and just skipped those sections.) The book as a whole is an interesting account of the post-war British left, albeit from one particular viewpoint; and, despite odd flashes of score-settling, Meltzer is an amusing raconteur. But a memoir without a name index…..? A metaphor involving tits and a bull comes to mind.

The Case Against Israel, and, The Power of Israel

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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

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 […]

Psi Spies

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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 […]

UDA: Inside the heart of Loyalist terror

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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

Inside ‘Inside Intelligence’

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

Inside Intelligence Anthony Cavendish Palu Publishing Ltd. 1987 Although many hundreds of books have been written on British Intelligence, very few have tackled post-war intelligence in any kind of depth or with any degree of reliability. By contrast, we tend to believe that we know quite a lot about the workings of the CIA. But … Read more

We The Nation: The Conservative Party and the Pursuit of Power

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The Nation … Read more

The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] story about which Morris has written elsewhere, and which will only be of use to historians of the period.(1) Notes 1 Since then Morris has changed his mind somewhat and has since become anti-Palestinian; or, at any rate, anti-Yassir Arafat. This political shift does not seem to have yet intruded in his research if […]

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

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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 […]

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