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 […]

Newsinger Bryant copy

Lobster Issue

[…] When I look around the Commons, I see dozens of people who have made a lasting difference for good’. Even those MPs whose political ideas ‘may to mind be completely round the twist, unfeeling and cruel’ nevertheless did not start out ‘misguided, let alone evil’. (pp. 14-15). This seems to be taking Christian charity […]

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 […]

Britain alone The Path from Suez to Brexit by Philip Stephens

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] – where it was considered Russia would exercise a veto and prevent action by the international community – they were not unreasonable considerations to be born in mind before engaging in military action. They were only of value, though, if other nations agreed to abide by them. The US quickly showed it had zero […]

The Christian Right Revisited

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] credentials. (p. 127) Trump, of course, did not attend the classes. There is much more of interest in Keddie’s book. Some minor points inevitably stick in the mind. For example, preacher John Hagee’s belief that the Harry Potter books are ‘a roadmap to witchcraft’ and that Potter’s forehead is marked ‘with the lightning bolt […]

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 view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 92 (2026) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[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 […]

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