A guided democracy The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph 23 June 2003. ‘Edward Heath created a secret government propaganda unit to persuade the British people to accept the Common Market. Civil servants were engaged in a dirty tricks department of the Foreign Office to cover up the threat to sovereignty and provide rapid rebuttal … Read more
[…] bleak winter of 1944-45, when Philby was busily forming his new Soviet counter-espionage section, that Muggeridge met him again… Two small incidents imprinted themselves indelibly on Muggeridge’s mind. Each concerned Philby. The first was a heated discussion at table about the rights and wrongs of withholding important Bletchley intercepts from the Soviet Union. It […]
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more
Researching the European State: a critical guide Edited by Tony Bunyan Statewatch PO Box 1516, London N16 0EW £7.00 With sixty A4 pages plus a six page index, this is, as the title suggests, an annotated bibliography. The flyer which came with it accurately described it thus: ‘This is the first bibliography on the European […]
[…] remains questionable – and here the CIA dimension takes on a greater importance. But neither was the end of ideology simply a CIA plot. With this in mind, what is perhaps more relevant is how this anti-ideological standpoint enabled the Congress to hold together a broad crosssection of the intellectual community who saw it […]
[…] breakthrough piece chronicling the links between the CIA; the Contras and the crack cocaine explosion in Los Angeles; through the CIA’s use of psychedelics, ex-Nazi scientists and mind control, into the murky worlds of Indo-China; and then, via a chapter on Afghanistan, back to the United States and the cocaine connections to Arkansas and […]
[…] had graduated from writing for Lobster (see number 24) to one of Canada’s leading daily papers, the Globe and Mail; and had done so by changing his mind and accepting that the Warren Commission was correct. In the Globe and Mail of January 21 this year there is another large piece by Mr Van […]
[…] Belfast worsened and, as an interim measure, Gibbons ordered 500 rifles to be transported to Dundalk on the border. The rifles had been stockpiled with this in mind – against the advice of Kelly, as they were traceable to the Irish Army – after a potential purchaser in August 1969 turned out to have […]
[…] 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.
Annie Machon Lewes (East Sussex): Book Guild, 2005, h/b, £17.95 It is hard to ‘see’ this book because a lot of the material, especially in the first half, is familiar, half-remembered from the press reporting of the Shayler-Machon drama and the book Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding and Mark Hollingsworth. Nonetheless, familiar or […]
