Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££
Free Ride Department Meanwhile the Rand Corporation (that liberal think tank in Santa Monica which helps decide which Russian cities should be atom-bombed) has declared that the federal government must continue to support an obscure military satellite system known as Global Positioning Network. Much beloved by high-tech hikers and rental car enthusiasts, the GPS supposedly … Read more
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££
[…] who shot the President. In Alias Oswald (Manchester, Maine; GKG partners, 1985) Robert Cutler and W. R. Morris argued that the second ‘Oswald’, was not a Soviet spy but a US spy. In their analysis the switch from one ‘Oswald’ to the other took place in 1958 while Oswald was serving in the Marine […]
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££
Operation Paget, the investigation by the team led by Sir John Stevens into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, briefly tried to investigate a collision between a white Fiat Uno and Princess Diana’s BMW. The head-on collision happened on 22 March 1996, on Cromwell Road, Kensington, when a casino employee lost control of a … Read more
Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££
[…] the Phoney War remains a taboo subject in many respects – even at the level of popular fiction. Len Deighton made his name with the Harry Palmer spy thrillers, three of which, The Ipcress File (1962), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion Dollar Brain (1965), were immediately filmed. The other book in the series, […]
Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££
[…] squeeze an early reply into his next column in the Guardian: ‘The professor’s caricature of this most principled, independent and forthright of journalists as just another suborned spy is ridiculous.’ Andrew’s attack on Ransome united two experts on Ransome’s days in Russia, who had previously been arguing about the meaning of Russian documents concerning […]
Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££
[…] a number of long pieces about Wallace and Holroyd – and about Kincora – for the Catholic end of the Irish media. (See, for example, ‘Framed? The spy caught up in his own web of intrigue’, Sunday World, 31 May 1987, ‘Garda “Spy” Now A Hero’, Sunday World, May 3, 1987, and ‘The MI5 […]
Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££
[…] – on the grounds that he was such a selfish little shit, he lacked the necessary patriotic motivation (I am not making this up) to be a spy. Lawson did move into a series of increasingly expensive houses through the eighties and nineties, however. But his wife’s family are rich. Ayer’s final years were […]
Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££
[…] of the American liberal-left who were so easily persuaded to surrender their independence and their critical judgement by the red scare of the early Cold War. I SPY: The Secret Life of a British Agent Geoffrey Elliott St Ermin’s Press/Little, Brown, London, 1998, £18.99 The agent in question was Elliott’s father, Kavan, about whom […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££
[…] thing as the ‘Sunni Triangle’. There is now. 9 As my father, an SIS agent and SIS’s one-time leading authority on Iraq, said (without being Iraq-specific), ‘A spy, on behalf of the Crown, cannot recruit good quality sources seeking to undermine a regime from within, if HMG is doing all it can to secure […]