The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] things would work, then he would try them and see. Failure would be down to the patient; success was his alone. What was his theory of the mind? (Though theory might dignify and elevate his thinking, such as it was.) It was quite simple and, shorn of psychiatric and psychoanalytic baggage, it is revealed […]

Brexit Revisited: Europe Didn’t Work, and, Brexit Unfolded

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] seen as paramount, thus closing off links to allies in Europe and the nature of the viper at the bosom (the US). The analogy that comes to mind is leaving the frying pan for the security of the fire. Narcissism Grey mentions the grandiosity and super confidence of Brexiteers, the irrationality of many of […]

President Putin and Sochi 2014 PR

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] chess master Natan Sharansky, or writer Alexander Solshenitsyn, once household names in the West but neither of whom are ‘celebrities’ in the West today. Also keep in mind that this is a two-way generational phenomenon. Young Eastern Europeans have absolutely no memory of Communism or the former Soviet system any more than Western ones […]

Trump and Trumpism: The Destructive Politics of American Fascism by Andrew Kolin

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] is Jacob Chansley) was wearing a costume that cost hundreds of dollars, paid for by his job as an accountant’. This, as Kolin points out, ‘brings to mind the social composition of fascist movements’. As for Trump, he is ‘a populist Wizard of Oz, presenting himself as a champion of the masses. But when […]

End Times: Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to control, not just the future but also adjacent scholarly disciplines. As Theodor W Adorno wrote of philosophical systembuilders, this is a symptom of the ‘belly turned mind’. My riposte on Turchin’s behalf is that internal divisions amongst the US elites – described in depth in End Times and now playing out within the […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] about this, remembering the dominance of Oxbridge-educated elites in British politics during the 1960s and 1970s when I was a young man. Recently, however, I changed my mind. The key moment for me was an MA dissertation by a student of mine, on the impact of the 1979 Brandt Report (North-South: a programme for […]

Deep Kiss: How the Washington Post missed the biggest Watergate story of all

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] sabotage has surfaced. But, from Haldeman’s January 1969 encounter with Nixon (described above), we know that Nixon entered office with his own subterfuge weighing heavily on his mind. This might have been compounded by the fact that, when he took office, Nixon abandoned any pretence at seeking peace and escalated the Vietnam War instead. […]

Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain by Phil Burton-Cartledge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Interpretation’, Sociological Review, volume 3 (1910). 6 4 stock market and to changes in State pension levels. This can all make for considerable anxiety, a state of mind likely to be intensified by rapid shifts in the political, economic and social environment. What had been seen as the stable and unchanging values of the […]

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