Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England by Sebastian Payne

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] the Labour Party and working-class voters is broken, it takes something new to win them back. The party has yet to find an answer for Scotland, never mind in England.’ So how is Starmer to do that given the structural, economic and societal changes that Payne says ‘have made these parts of England more […]

The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas, 1939-45 by Max Hastings

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] of Britain – ‘few’ against the Nazi ‘hordes’ – and the much bruited morale and good humour of the little English people in their slums – ‘never mind, dear, put on the kettle and we’ll have a nice cup of tea’1 – under the impact of Blitzkrieg. That’s the popular British version. The saturation […]

007’s real mission continues

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] began writing the 007 books, the official story is that Fleming began to write ‘the spy story to end all spy stories’ in order to ‘take his mind off an impending marriage’. While marriage for the long time bachelor was certainly in the works, other more important things were on his mind. Noel Coward, […]

South of the border (occasional snippets from)

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] of ‘crass assassination plots’.2 Which is an odd way of describing what had happened, as the Merriam-Webster definition of crass is ‘having or indicating such grossness of mind as precludes delicacy and discrimination’.3 Indeed, leading figures from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) would have it very differently. Speaking a month after the […]

The SIS and London-based foreign dissidents: some patterns of espionage

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] incidents. These came as one-offs or in waves. They stopped as quickly as they started, only to kick off again just as a semblance of peace of mind was being restored. Although largely invisible to mainstream Britain, the fear and hysteria this engendered within the Iraqi community and those associated with it was beyond […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] . 10 8 chaired the Jewish Leadership Council, a key body in promoting the ‘Labour anti-semitism’ scare?11 This is just one of many questions that come to mind reading this tour d’horizon of the much-travelled diarist. But first he must be thanked for telling us so much about the workings of UK government and […]

Kelly Bond 007 text

Lobster Issue

[…] began writing the 007 books, the official story is that Fleming began to write ‘the spy story to end all spy stories’ in order to ‘take his mind off an impending marriage’. While marriage for the long time bachelor was certainly in the works, other more important things were on his mind. Noel Coward, […]

The Two Goulds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: The two Goulds Robin Ramsay In ‘The crisis’ in issue 62 of Lobster I referred to the economic debate during the Labour Party’s policy review, which produced the Meet the Challenge, Make the Change document in 1989. On page 6 of that are these sentences: The Conservatives are the party for the City. We are […]

Accessibility Toolbar