Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] us this about Sarah Brown and the spin doctors, Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan: ‘The demure public image was the front of a woman with a steely mind who was fiercely protective of her husband and family. She formed a strong, and to some at No 10 surprising, alliance with Damian McBride and Charlie […]

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 […]

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the powers-that-be. According to Greenwald’s somewhat hysterical formulation, the citizen understands that if they ‘. . . pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that […]

Undercover killers at the BBC

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] dead four years later on a ridge 700 metres below the summit of Mount Snowdon. A coroner found that he died of exposure when his state of mind was affected by alcohol, sleeping pills and confusion due to his personal situation. Paul Atkinson has now revealed how nine months before the Burnt House Farm […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Check this I am not a lover of faction. I prefer my facts and my fiction distinct. I didn’t even read Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup. However I received an email from […]

The Super-Rich Shall Inherit the Earth: The New Global Oligarchs and How They’re Taking Over Our World by Stephen Armstrong

Lobster Issue

[…] ‘affordable’ colourchanging fibre-optic carpets (currently very ‘in’) become available, although if platinum taps hit Homebase any time soon, the billionaires will have to up their game sharply. Mind you, even with this trend it will probably be a while before any of us mere mortals are shopping for helicopters and submarines, as many of […]

The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016: a political and economic history by Scott Newton

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] and economic underperformance spurred a search for more modern tools than public ownership and strong trade unions. That is fair enough, but it should be borne in mind that social democracy, as practised from Macmillan onwards, was to the right of the 1945 settlement. Hence the impatience of Labour romantics such as Michael Foot […]

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