7 DECEMBER 1956, Page 7

AMONG THE reactions of people I have met whom the

Suez Crisis has left comparatively unmoved., the most curious was that of an atomic engineer in London for the recent Symposium on Calder Hall. His attitude was one of irritation that the whole affair had not happened fifteen years later, when we need not be dependent on oil from the Middle East. Ah ! If only the Thirty Years War had begun when the age of religious fanaticisth was past! If only the Second World War had started twenty years later so that Hitler would have been dead before it began