The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. Unbecoming American Dr T. P. Wilkinson wrote a dozen or so striking essays for Lobster. Some of them are included in a collection of his essays, Unbecoming American: A War Memoir, available from Amazon.1 […]

President Putin and Sochi 2014 PR

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] chess master Natan Sharansky, or writer Alexander Solshenitsyn, once household names in the West but neither of whom are ‘celebrities’ in the West today. Also keep in mind that this is a two-way generational phenomenon. Young Eastern Europeans have absolutely no memory of Communism or the former Soviet system any more than Western ones […]

lob28liberalapocalypsepdf

Lobster Issue

[…] always easy meat for the orthodoxy of the City.) What was inflation between 1945 and 1970, 2-4% per annum on average? Who, in his or her right mind, would not trade off 4% inflation for full employment and 2% growth? Vaisey’s vision Another version of the same basic perception that a great watershed had […]

Who really killed Chris Hani? by Chris Nicholson

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] past 40 years or so.4 He quotes a South African report from 1991 describing it as ‘an informal forum of influential representatives of a “conservative cast of mind“’ – which is what Pinay/Le Cercle was and remains. Among recent British participants are former Conservative MPs Norman Lamont, Rory Stewart and Jonathan Aitken.5 Three pages […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] about this, remembering the dominance of Oxbridge-educated elites in British politics during the 1960s and 1970s when I was a young man. Recently, however, I changed my mind. The key moment for me was an MA dissertation by a student of mine, on the impact of the 1979 Brandt Report (North-South: a programme for […]

Deep Kiss: How the Washington Post missed the biggest Watergate story of all

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] sabotage has surfaced. But, from Haldeman’s January 1969 encounter with Nixon (described above), we know that Nixon entered office with his own subterfuge weighing heavily on his mind. This might have been compounded by the fact that, when he took office, Nixon abandoned any pretence at seeking peace and escalated the Vietnam War instead. […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[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 […]

LBJ: doubles and disinformation

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] even his clothes looked exactly like the President. It was as if a ghost had suddenly appeared. Even his voice sounded so much like Mr. Kennedy’s. My mind simply couldn’t absorb it all and Louise was struck dumb, her eyes wide open in amazement. Lish introduced the double as a fellow agent and apologized […]

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