Churchill and Secret Service

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] Reilly and T. E. Lawrence through to Fitzroy Maclean and Orde Wingate, Churchill enjoyed the company of such men, listening to their stories of secret operations, of murder and mayhem, and narrow escapes. Certainly this reflected a romantic streak in his intellectual make-up, but it also represented a belief that sometimes the security of […]

The covert origins of the Biafran War

Lobster Issue 25 (1993) £££

[…] officials of the South, who were forever building schools and dispensaries, “nigger lovers”. ‘In this topsy turvy world of secret intelligence reports, MI5, pimps, prostitutes, rape and murder, presided over by the Colonial Office and Harold Macmillan, it was not surprising that the Nigerian political leader of great personal integrity and honesty — Awolowo […]

Parapolitical bits and pieces

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] its entirety … (they) present recent Soviet missile deployments in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR as legitimately defensive ” etc. A large (two page) piece on the murder of Hilda Murrell (the anti-nuclear campaigner) in New Statesman (9 November 1984), laying out all the oddities in the case. Tam Dalyell’s repeated claims that this […]

French vendetta: from Rainbow Warrior to the Iranian hostages deal

Lobster Issue 16 (1988) £££

[…] Lebanese contacts to the Interior Ministry’s DST, kept silent about Mazurier’s role and about their direct contacts with Abdallah lieutenant Jacqueline Esber. (Esber is suspected of the murder of Yacov Basimantov, 2nd Secretary for political affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Paris, in April 1982). The DGSE also withheld information confirming Abdallah’s key role […]

Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British anti-semitism 1939/1940

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] pp. 107-111 revealed similar stories. Elphick’s is the first study of the Far East debacle of 1941/1942 to be produced after the release of previously withheld documents. See Tom Bower’s Blind Eye to Murder – Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany – A Pledge Betrayed (1981) p. 283. Bower calls Stokes extreme right.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

Robert Caro New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK) (But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com)   This is the third volume in Caro’s biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their … Read more

Kennedy assassination miscellany: Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] it seems an employee of Collins Radio, who had a security clearance, was parked in the car park where Oswald allegedly dropped a jacket shortly after the murder of Officer Tippit. (This is in a volume of the House Select Committee on Assassinations but I don’t have the reference at hand. If someone can […]

The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners; GB84

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99   On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more

Good-bye Tony

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Lobster’s writers say farewell (in approximately 250 words or less) In alphabetical order: Richard Alexander: Good riddance. Dan Atkinson: Prediction is a mug’s game, but here is one forecast for the early, troubled years of the next decade: Tony Blair’s ten years in power will be widely seen as a golden age of cheap consumer … Read more

RAF colluded in Hess flight

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] rambling man who had trudged from the wreck of the Bf110 in Scotland was not in fact Hess, but a ‘double’, substituted by the SS after the murder of Hess. This theory draws some support from the discovery of yet another flight blotted from RAF records in the month of May 1941. Ten days […]

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