PR, Iraq and ‘the allies’

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] swipe at the Americans and double-entendre: ‘There are no chinks in our security’. Doubtless, had the script not been so bad, the story about the happily bungling spy could have played in Iraq as part of Britain’s ‘hearts and minds’ campaign: a sort of movie equivalent to British troops losing 9 – 3 to […]

The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during World War 2

Lobster Issue 20 (1990) £££

[…] life of R.A. Butler (London, 1987). G. Ingham, Capitalism divided? The city and industry in British social development (Cambridge, 1984). P. Knightley, The second oldest profession: the spy as patriot bureaucrat, fantasist and whore (London, 1986). R. Lamb, The drift to war, 1922-1939 (London, 1989) J. Leutze (ed.) The London journal of Raymond E. […]

Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] stories on Zinoviev appeared in August: ‘Red Letter Day’ by Patrick French, in the Sunday Times 10 August 1997, and ‘The forgery, the election and the MI6 spy’ by Michael Smith in the Daily Telegraph 13 August 1997. Both articles were based on the release of certain documents from SIS’s archives which purport to […]

Tailpiece

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

Out there in the wonderful world of commercial science, the ability to do what mind control victims have been complaining of for nearly 20 years is coming into view. On 8 April CNN reported that a Sony scientist has a patent, first granted in 2000, on an ultrasound device which in the words of CNN’s … Read more

Secret Contenders

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] bass” and landed in Havana in 1959, just as the first Russian freighter was arriving. Fairly early on Beck’s narrative begins to resemble the ‘Get Smart’ TV spy spoof. He dresses up as a tourist and hangs around the docks with his Brownie, in the bar of the Hilton, and at a travel agents’ […]

Twilight in the desert: the coming Saudi oil shock and the world economy

Book cover
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b   Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more

Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] Later I mentioned the idea that the spooks fed material into novels to Fred Holroyd, and, to my surprise, he told me that one of Britain’s leading spy fiction writers had cheerfully confirmed that the spooks did indeed send him material they wanted planting in his books. The perceptible increase in this country of […]

More JFK Assassination books

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

First off, a slight digression. There’s been much talk recently about just how many books have been published on the assassination. ‘Over 2000’ is the figure that has been thrown around and this may be traced to the very opening sentence of Gerald Posner’s egregious Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK … Read more

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival or a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more

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