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

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[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 […]

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 […]

View from 92

Lobster Issue

[…] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a […]

lob84-view from the bridge (sept 84)

Lobster Issue

[…] records, the invocation of “the ‘Who shot John?’ angle” can only refer to one thing: Kennedy’s assassination. The ambush in Dallas was the first thing on Nixon’s mind as he pressed the director for the agency’s Bay of Pigs files. The president intuited a connection between the failed invasion in 1961 and JFK’s assassination […]

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

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[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 […]

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 view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. 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 one […]

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