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Lobster Issue

[…] then the impunity of it. I realised that the UK has almost no laws about political corruption. I’d research all this material and think, “What?! Another Russian spy donating to the Tories?” or “Boris Johnson really flew to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev’s Italian villa while foreign minister without any aides present? He […]

I helped carry William Burroughs to the medical tent

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 1961, though, MacMillan seemed in serious disarray, badly behind in the polls and widely mocked by many of the UK intelligentsia. There is also evidence that the spy scandals of 1962-1963 caused many in the US to finally lose patience with their British allies.2 9 Coupled with the emergence of Wilson as the next […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must *new* From the dim and distant past Reading British spy Greville Wynne’s The Man From Moscow,1 I noticed that MI6 had set him up as a potential traitor. This was presumably done to ensure there was a fall-back position if it were deemed necessary that […]

Beaumont novel copy

Lobster Issue

A Spy Alone Charles Beaumont London: Canelo, 2023, £9.99 (p/b) Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] not hesitate to obliterate us if they could. If we want to protect ourselves – and who seriously would argue that we shouldn’t? – we have to spy on them. In electronic terms that means looking for needles in haystacks and you can’t do that 16 without having access to the whole hayfield.’ GCHQ […]

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