Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] threaten the emerging Lloyd George corporate/military state. Hoare sketches the background against which this unfolded. Theatrical, social and sexual mores are analysed, as are both the enemy spy hysteria of 1915 and the belief of the time in a unique German /Jewish form of decadence (cue Krafft-Ebing and Freud). The grind of a nation […]

Miscellany

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] in the Observer (24 Feb. 1985) on the Belgrano business: “It’s pretty obvious that the information the Government claim is secret is the position of the American spy satellites.” This may be a pretty educated guess. As Jim Hougan reveals in his Secret Agenda (reviewed in this issue), Woodward had a very important job […]

The Strange Case of Patrick Daly, MI5 agent

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] in…. and so was Pat Daly. In Long Lartin he was well treated and comfortable. He was in the cell next to Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ Soviet spy. Prime had a copy of Soviet Weekly delivered to him, often by a nun! His divorced wife (who, after her conversion to a fundamentalist sect, wrote […]

Paranoia is what the other guy has

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] evidenced by its taste for conspiracy theories. While she recognises that conspiracies do happen, and cites the Catilinarian 2 and Cato Street conspiracies along with the Cambridge spy ring and Watergate as evidence of her breadth of historical vision, she is in no doubt that ‘…historical conspiracies are rare. The vast majority of apparently […]

The Secret War for the Falklands

Book cover
Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] though not in this detail. The other 80% of the book is little more than padding – on the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe, the SR 71 spy plane, the French intelligence service SDECE, the Chilean intelligence service DINA; ten pages on the career of the SIS officer Anthony Dival; eight pages on the […]

The final testimony of George Kennedy Young

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

The final testimony of George Kennedy Young Introduction When this was published we believed that it had been written by a close friend of his. Subsequently we learned that it had been written by Young himself. As far as we were able to judge, it is accurate. But this is by no means the whole … Read more

Parapolitical bits and pieces

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] Without knowing what his information is, a priori the problem with his story is that it hinges upon extraordinary incompetence by said British intelligence. Any reader of spy fiction would have been able to create a more plausible scene for the police to find than that left by ‘British intelligence’. Rather more plausible would […]

Notes on contamination

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] Agency to be able to obtain details from the Inland Revenue, banks and building societies. An article in the Daily Mail 7 August 1996, ‘Benefits police may spy on your savings’, reported that while there was no legal prohibition on the Benefits Agency accessing building society and banks’ records, it was not done ‘by […]

Northern Ireland redux

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] it is impossible to tell whether the two women are 20 or 50, never mind whether they were attractive or not. Livingstone states in his column: ‘The spy master Peter Wright, of Spycatcher fame, makes no mention in his book of the extensive work he undertook in Ireland, yet he was the central figure […]

Lockerbie, the octopus and the Maltese double cross

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] of the CIA. It appears that one of its main roles is to monitor the clandestine activity of other US government agencies. Coleman’s DIA job was to spy on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which operated out of a base in Cyprus. Coleman alleges that the DEA is supervising, and the DIA is manipulating, […]

Accessibility Toolbar