MB Reed

Author and mathematician

 

Footnotes for 'Conjecture', Chapters 17-25

Chapter 17: A Surprise

  1. Davidoff cigarettes


Hospital Diary XI

  1. Relapse: See Oliver Sacks’ book Awakenings and the eponymous film.

  2. The recurrence of catatonic schizophrenia in the 1980’s, in patients who had taken the designer drug MPTP, is mentioned in a footnote in Awakenings. Dr Langston has written a readable account of the detective story tracing the cause, in the introduction to his paper The MPTP Story. He has also co-authored a book on it: The Case of the Frozen Addicts (Langston and Palfreman, IOS Press, 2014).


Hospital Diary XII

  1. If you could hear the blood come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs….: From Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

  2. There is a Youtube video of the scene in You only live twice between Bond and Helga Brandt.


Chapter 18: Alex

  1. A report on alleged paedophile parties organised at Dolphin Square.

  2. A history of the debate about whether smoking causes lung cancer.


Chapter 19: Swimbridge revisited

  1. How the Common Fisheries Policy was imposed on the UK at the last minute, before the 1970 Accession.

  2. The Wilson Plot: The bugging allegations and the MI5 story. Wikipedia.

  3. Viscount Stansgate.

  4. The British Nationality Act 1948 allowed the 800,000,000 subjects in the British Empire to live and work in the United Kingdom without needing a visa.

  5. Kim Philby was, as a member of the Establishment, cleared of being a spy by the Prime Minister.

  6. The Abwehr.


Hospital Diary XIII

  1. Oliver Sacks, in his autobiography On The Move mentions on page 302 a visit by Harold Pinter to the post-encephalitic ward at Highlands Hospital while researching for his play A Kind of Alaska.

  2. Photo of Rudolf Hess in flying helmet

  3. The May 1941 flight of Rudolf Hess, to negotiate a peace treaty with Britain, is analysed meticulously in Double Standards.

  4. The book by Hugh Thomas is The Murder of Rudolf Hess. A 2019 DNA test showed that the Spandau prisoner was indeed from the Hess family.


Chapter 20: Politics and Philosophy

  1. Churchill’s Auxiliary Units.

  2. An example of a politically-sensitive trial where the jury foreman was revealed as an SAS officer.


Chapter 21: City of Lights

  1. The Golden Arrow

  2. The Priory of Sion

  3. Hitler’s drug use: Dr Theodor Morell.

  4. Stalin: The Doctors’ Plot.

  5. Churchill’s drug use: Lord Moran’s prescriptions

  6. Lady Moran: born Dorothy Dufton, was a pupil of Sir Joseph Barcroft. “He was a renowned embryologist, but also worked intensively on blood, particularly at high altitudes. Lady Moran also studied blood, when researching the effects of mustard gas on the WW1 troops. She spent a year in St Thomas’s Hospital in a ‘coma’ before marrying Lord Moran. Barcroft was head of the physiology department at Porton Down and Dorothy Dufton became his assistant. They co-authored the Chemical Warfare Committe’s reports in 1918 and 1919”. Quote from ukmindcontrol.blogspot.com

  7. It is disturbing to see SMRT, the Russian for ‘death’, written in every carriage of the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit system.

  8. The Franc-Garde was the armed wing of the Milice in Vichy France, the common name for the French State (Etat Francais).

  9. The description of crossing the border is based on my experience travelling by train from West Germany through the GDR to Berlin in the 1970’s.

  10. Shoemakers, lamplighters: spy jargon of John le Carré used in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

  11. Counterpart of the Berlin Airlift of 1948.

  12. Voiturette


Chapter 22: Ile St Louis

  1. Lin Piao: Mao’s Deputy, who fled China in September 1971. Lin Biao in the new transliteration.

  2. Gustave Moreau paintings.

  3. Jim Morrison, the singer with The Doors, died in Paris in July 1971.


Chapter 23: Von Schacht

  1. My Lai massacre

  2. [The Eagle and Child]

  3. The JG Ballard story is The Garden of Time.


Chapter 24: South

  1. Pervitin: Among the drugs supplied to German soldiers was Pervitin, the forerunner of crystal meth.

  2. The Demarcation Line divided France into German Occupation Zone and ‘Free Zone’.


Chapter 25: La Pérouse

  1. La Pérouse is today known as Tamentfoust.

  2. The expulsion of 105 Soviet diplomats in September 1971 is known as Operation FOOT. It is “[t]he largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any government in history.”


Hospital Diary XV

  1. Fallingbostel: The location of a large BAOR base. During the war it housed POW camps and the Stalag XI-B camp for Soviet prisoners. There were also tank ranges, and barracks for the SS Division Das Reich and the SS-Freiwilligen-Legion Norwegen.

Appendix: JIO paper

  1. Group 13: Group 13 is rumoured to be a secret cadre of ex-SAS and military intelligence operatives. Group 13’s remit seems to lay in deniable covert actions such as assassinations. It is rumoured to be run via the Foreign Office, through the SIS. Group 13 have been linked to various controversial incidents such as the 1990 assassination of Gerald Bull (designer of the so-called Supergun, meant for Saddam’s regime), the death of Biological weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003, and the 1984 shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy. Elite UK Forces

  2. Hilda Murrell: Hilda Murrel was a British rose grower, naturalist, diarist and campaigner against nuclear power and nuclear weapons. She was abducted and found murdered five miles from her home in Shropshire in 1984. Despite a conviction based on DNA and fingerprint evidence and a confession, the case remains controversial and subject to conspiracy theories. Wikipedia