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 […]

A guided democracy

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

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

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

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

Sources

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] Rd., Hyson Green, Nottingham NG7. Shot by both sides: a response to paranoia and disinformation, by Paul Cox Cox was in the BNP when young, changed his mind and has since been researching the British right for a book. He contacted Gerry Gable at Searchlight who offered to swop information (tried to recruit him). […]

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] most subtle and successful conspiracies…….to embroil us in a foreign war’ But, unknown to Aaronovitch, there was such a conspiracy (though not the one Flynn had in mind) – and it involved not just Flynn’s hate figure, Roosevelt, but the British government. Part of the conspiracy was a series of covert operations in America […]

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

Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

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 […]

Ian Macgregor, Lazards, Pearsons, and Amax

Lobster Issue 5 (1984) £££

Ian Macgregor, Lazards, Pearsons, and Amax PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Summary This article attempts to show that the present chairman of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, is far more than the “right man for the job” imported from the U.S. by a Government set simply on technical efficiency. Macgregor’s … Read more

Conspiracy theories are go!

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] Clinton and Arkansas.(8) My faith in the author, Nicholas A. Guarino, is not heightened by the bizarre autobiographical spiel about him prefacing the piece. Headlined ‘The Fastest Mind on Wall Street’, this begins by telling us that he got a speeding ticket at the age of seven, has an IQ of over 200, and […]

Rolling Back Revolution: The Emergence of Low Intensity Conflict

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55   In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more

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