Sir John Sawer’s speech and some aspects of SIS PR

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] ideal: i.e. he condemned torture and had the credibility to do 11 Question: how do you give a YouTube video legs? Answer: you remove it. Keep in mind that The Sunday Times reported ‘Sawers wants to phase out the image of the MI6 officer as a globetrotting James Bond figure who undertakes glamorous missions […]

Inside the Trump Administration

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] purely partisan political purposes or personal gain’. There had been what amounted to a ‘kind of privatization of national security’. (p. 253) Rudy Giuliani immediately springs to mind in this regard. This was to lead to her giving evidence at Trump’s first impeachment, a key witness whose testimony took 10 hours to deliver. But […]

Last post for Oswald

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] Postal Inspector Harry Holmes, he ended up taking part in Oswald’s interrogation on the morning of Sunday 24 November 1963 purely by happenstance. He supposedly changed his mind about going to church at 9.30am and made his way to Dallas Police HQ instead, where Captain Will Fritz unexpectedly invited him into the interrogation room. […]

The Return of the Public, and, Death of the Liberal Class

Lobster Issue

[…] for faint hearts. It has much of the challenging force of those German anti-Nazis – Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Fritz Reck-Malleczewen are two names who come readily to mind – who steadfastly marked out the ground in earlier battles for rights, decency and integrity in a disordered world. Tom Easton is a freelance writer. 145 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] on the free market/business groups assembled around the Conservative Party’s spokespeople on the environment and economic policy, on a site that is new to me, DESMOG.uk.13 Never mind the imminent collapse of the environment, what we need is more economic freedom and less government regulation! The question that always arises with these groups is […]

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 […]

Kelly Bond 007 essay

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 DRE newsletter (June – August 1963)

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] vessel’s seaworthiness, thus relaxing the Customs office’s surveillance and allowing the raiding party to escape. It is safe to say that no Customs official in their right mind would have taken the unsupported word of the boat’s owner on something so crucial. Cuban surnames follow the Spanish pattern. An individual’s surname is their father’s […]

1976 and all that: the IMF incident

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] 23 November 1976 Tony Benn noted in his diary, ‘Peter suspected the figures produced by the Treasury.’ As did Prime Minister Callaghan: ‘The only doubt in my mind, borne of previous experience, was how far to trust the figures.’ James Callaghan, Time and Chance (London: Collins, 1987) p. 422. Healey wrote: ‘I cannot help […]

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