The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 1839. Henderson emailed on 6 April: ‘ Starmer is my MP. Mmmm . . . I wonder if I should visit him at his surgery and re mind him of the time when he was the Director of Public Prosecutions and how he refused to take action after Tony and Cherie Blair had attempted […]

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 […]

Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] in the Middle East just opens Pandora’s Box and we have no politics of democratic change or change of any sort in the region’. He does not mind bombing Saddam, but he cannot see any ‘strategic analysis of what to do in the region as a whole. We live from hand to mouth.’ He […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA David Black Is History a fiction? In his best-seller of 1991, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, the late John Bossy claimed that Bruno spied for Queen Elizabeth’s enforcer, Sir Francis Walsingham, at the French embassy in London. This was a […]

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)

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

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