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 […]

Undercover killers at the BBC

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[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 […]

Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom by John Strafford

Lobster Issue

[…] Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor at the time of the Iraq invasion, told him ‘that whatever the size of the march the Government would not have changed its mind.’ Which is what we all suspected anyway. Tony Blair, Dubya’s political catamite, knew what was expected of him and was determined to deliver it. 199 Summer […]

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, and, This Land: The Story of a Movement

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] a delicate time to move on the British people from the ‘war on terror’ mindset previous leaders and their media backers had encouraged, a belligerent state of mind challenged in 2003 by Corbyn’s friend Robin Cook when he opposed the invasion of Iraq.52 Time will tell whether such hopes for a different, more equal, […]

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 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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[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 […]

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)

[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 […]

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