Brexit Revisited: Europe Didn’t Work, and, Brexit Unfolded

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] seen as paramount, thus closing off links to allies in Europe and the nature of the viper at the bosom (the US). The analogy that comes to mind is leaving the frying pan for the security of the fire. Narcissism Grey mentions the grandiosity and super confidence of Brexiteers, the irrationality of many of […]

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 […]

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 […]

Knightley

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 William Blum’s The CIA: a forgotten history, Zed Books, 1986, illustrates this was well as any single volume can. There has been […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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