Your cut-out-and-keep guide to the millennium celebrations T he Northern Ireland executive sat for the first time, although its two Democrat- ic Unionist ministers did not take...

SARAH SANDS S ullen critics have attributed the success of Sir Cliff Richard's 'The Millennium Prayer' to the abysmal taste of an unguided British public. Much more threatening...

Margaret Thatcher would have relished the Helsinki challenge; Tony Blair is close to panic BRUCE ANDERSON A glance at the headlines might suggest a typical British build-up to...

The NHS makes me wonder whether I'll ever be a proper Tory MATTHEW PARRIS W by don't you go private?' My sec- retary had a point. She and I had found two plastic chairs...

Mark Littlewood explains why he has left Britain in Europe in protest at the pusillanimity of the Prime Minister TONY BLAIR has a number of personae on the European stage....

MY friend Sarah Johnson, who is mar- ried to one of Paul Johnson's egghead sons, told him something he didn't know the other day, and nor did I. There is a company, Gap, that...

Greed, fear and boredom have turned us into millennial party-poopers, says Tim Dowling BACK when the Artist Formerly Known As Prince, or Prince as he was then known, first...

The motoring lobby scents blood but John Prescott has got his roads policy right, argues Ross Clark LOUDER even than the traffic on White- hall is the screech of vultures...

Israel is split by the growing number of Russian immigrants who have an unorthodox taste for 'white meat, says Julian Manyon Jerusalem IN the shop on Shamai Street where I buy...

Tom Walker reports from among the prostitutes, drug smugglers and rogues of Sierra Leone Freetown IN the Sierra Leone of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter there were...

Incest and other harmless perversions should be tolerated, says Felipe Fernandez-Artnesto HAS this country ever been less tolerant? I doubt it. On the one hand are those miser-...

Rumours that John McCain is bananas have done wonders for his presidential bid, observes Mark Steyn New Hampshire THE first John McCain campaign stop I attended was at Lebanon...

Beggars are honourable people, says Lloyd Evans. They have faith, hope, charity — and courage MESSAGE to party-goers: if you're expect- ing a beggar to break your fall as you...

Rachel Johnson on the deal Mr Kinnock has done with the people who really run Europe Brussels 'AND now, if there are no more questions on hormones in beef,' said Signor...

The government's obsession with the educational powers of the new technology is failing our children, says James Delingpole WHENEVER I hear Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Greg...

Global corruption is everywhere, including Labour's backyard PAUL JOHNSON D owning Street let it be known this week that the Prime Minister has been hav- ing urgent talks with...

Mr Blair's Ministry of Truth is keeping tabs on the Mail and the Telegraph STEPHEN GLOVER L ast Thursday the Guardian columnist Hugo Young inclined his noble head and poured...

the likes of me, one of the so-called 'propagan- dists' he reviles. He should go to Kosovo and see for himself. Go to Little Drusha. Last March, 118 Albanian men and boys were...

conceit to write about contemporary events as if they were ancient history, relying on secondary sources instead of making an on-the-spot inspection, but even a historian as...

The Kosovo question From Mr John Laughland Sir: When judging between me and Noel Malcolm (`Yes, there were mass killings', 4 December) your readers should be aware that Mr...

From Mr Peter Tatchell Sir: Robert Shrimsley is mistaken to accuse me of having 'hidden' my homosexuality when I stood as a Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election...

From Mr R.J. Grant Sir: There may be those who think Michael Diboll's discernment of incipient fascism in the Blairite Third Way is paranoid (`Unite against the centre', 27...

From Mr Roger Lewis Sir: Allan Massie (Letters, 4 December) asks by whom Anthony Burgess has been forgot- ten? By my publishers, for a start. Picador commissioned me to write...

From Miss J. Greengrass Sir: Ignorance is not confined to the respon- dents to opinion pollsters (Shared opinion, 4 December). King Herod ordered the slaughter not of the...

credibility by posing as a Serbo-Croat lin- guist. If he were, he would know that `Kacaniku' is merely the normal dative or locative case inflection of the Serbian place-name...

From Mr Euan Graham Sir: Vicki Woods concludes her review of Max Hastings's book Scattered Shots (4 December) by saying, 'I'll think I'll just mention the name Tiger Woods and...

From Bishop Hugh Montefiore Sir: Though no expert on the contents of ladies' handbags, I wonder whether, if we accept Paul Johnson's list of their contents (And another thing,...

The outrageous elitism to which Mr and Mrs Blair have been subjected FRANK JOHNSON M any would have been shocked that Mrs Cherie Blair — who the previous Sun- day had been...

The master of the indirect Anita Brookner HENRY JAMES: COLLEL I ED STORIES, VOLUMES I and II with introductions by John Bayley Everyman, £12.50 each, pp. 1237 and pp. 1089 H...

William Scammell SEVERAL STRANGERS: WRITING FROM THREE DECADES by Claire Tomalin Ming, L18.99, pp. 248 G What is it the best writers do? They infuse the world with their...

Robert Oakeshott NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS by Desmond Tutu Rider, Random House, £14.99, pp. 244 T owards the end of this memorable as well as potentially most consequential...

Robert Stewart THE BALKANS, 1804-1999 by Misha Glenny Crania, £25, pp. 726 D uring a television discussion of the recent troubles in Yugoslavia a senior politician remarked that...

Jane Ridley THE COTTAGE BOOK: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY DIARY OF AN EDWARDIAN STATESMAN by Sir Edward and Lady Grey Gollancz, f18.99, pp. 176 T his is a book that can't decide...

David Ekserdjian A rt books still have little to fear from computer screens, at least while the quality of reproduction they can offer is so incom- parably superior. It cannot...

Sarah Anderson THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: A.D. 2,000 YEARS OF CHRISTIANITY edited by Christopher Howse SPC1C £20, pp. 192 I was puzzled by this book from the moment I started reading...

Ian Ousby CRIMEA: THE GREAT CRIMEAN WAR, 1854-56 by Trevor Royle Little, Brown, £22.50, pp. 564 I n our current preoccupation with the world wars of this century we should...

Julie Burchill DIANA by Sally Bedell Smith Aurum, L16.99, pp. 368 A remarkable thing about the late Princess of Wales — peace be upon her is that, uniquely among icons, she...

Miranda France GOODBYE, BUENOS AIRES by Andrew Graham-Yooll Shoestring, £7.99, pp. 225 L atin American writers seem to prefer describing real events and people in novels,...

Emma Tennant ANNUALS AND BIENNIALS by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix Macmillan, £19.99, pp. 288 T his book is billed as 'the first major illustrated work on annuals for over 150...

Juliet Townsend W hen I was a small child in the 1940s, I had two little books which I loved called the Please and Thank You Books. Each deals with a rude, spoilt child who...

William Feaver THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE by John Richardson Cape, £20, pp. 320 don't know William Feaver, nor even who he is — and I am shy by nature. I don't feel we need an...

Peter Vansittart THE TIME BEFORE YOU DIE by Lucy Beckett Ignatius, £12.99, pp. 331 Available from Words Inc, 01243 517 3648 T he Tudor state was harsh, sometimes ferocious,...

Robbie Millen AFTER PROGRESS: FINDING THE OLD WAY FORWARD by Anthony O'Hear Bloomsbury, f14.99, pp. 270 A duke of Cambridge from the last century once blustered that he was on...

Harriet Waugh t his best Michael Dibdin's crime novels have run the gamut of the laugh- aloud heartless cynicism of Dirty Tricks to the grisly humour of The Dying of the Light...

P. J. Kavanagh STEPHEN SPENDER by David Leeming Duckworth, £20, pp. 288 B ecause Spender wanted his biography, should there be one, written by an English- man, he gave the...

Leave it to the people More should be done to ensure collections are left to the nation, writes Andrew Lambirth I n a recent Spectator article about the collection of high art,...

Ruth Guilding on how a scholar helped fuel a row about ownership of the Elgin Marbles T here was an unholy row last week behind the scenes at the British Museum. A conference...

Gilbert & George (Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, till 6 January) Excelling at squalor Martin Gayford A t the risk of seeming obsessed with the subject, I offer another...

Vivant Denon (Louvre, Paris, till 17 January) Rabid collector Nicholas Powell I magine Alastair Campbell, Neil Mac- Gregor, Peter Mandelson and Chris Smith all rolled into...

Alcina (Coliseum) Didn't they do well? Michael Tanner E nglish National Opera's contribution this year to the season of good cheer and thoughtlessness is a new production,...

The Limey (18, selected cinemas) Salute to the Sixties Mark Steyn T erence Stamp is The Limey; Peter Fonda is, well, the slimey — a scaly music biz exec Stamp flies to...

New York recovery Sheridan Morley New York The fabulous invalid, as the New York theatre has always been known, is out of intensive care at last and at least staggering toward...

Non-stop wallpaper Peter Phillips I have so far managed to see only one of Andrew Graham-Dixon's programmes on Renaissance art (BBC 2, Sunday) — the most recent one, dealing...

Present time Ursula Buchan I f gardening had not existed, we should certainly have had to invent it. How else could we grapple with those eternal ques- tions, like what to do...

Loving the Dome James Delingpole J ust in case you didn't know this already, the Millennium Dome is going to be a huge success. This I find rather depressing, first because if...

Grey matters Michael Vestey F or sheer high quality this year there has been little to beat The Charm of Birds, a four-part series on Radio Four from the BBC's Natural History...

Flat out Robin Oakley W hen that electric two-miler Tingle Creek was alive and racing, the best that jockeys like Ian Watkinson and Steve Smith-Eccles could do was to aim him...

King Constantine of Greece spoke at the Woodrow Wilson School's Menaeos Society — created in honour of the first non-English speaking foreign student to attend the university...

Dating dangerously Toby Young 'Blasted mobiles.' room. Now, with enormous reluctance, I'm going to have to start dating again. Dating. Even the word fills me with hor- ror....

Crime and punishment Leanda de Lisle T he story of the 16-year-old who went to the anti-capitalist demonstration in Euston to give the police flowers and was hit with a...

Speaking out Petronella Wyatt I had to make a speech the other day at an Oldie magazine lunch. I forbore to won- der aloud how many of them would see in the millennium. I still...

Bid on Andrew Robson 'WHENEVER I reopen the bidding after the opponents have stopped in a part score, they always seem to bid and make game,' a reader recently complained....

At4i0, Si6n Simon WHEN Restaurant Gordon Ramsay opened a year ago, I gave it an unreserved- ly rave review in my Daily Express restau- rant column. Immoderate praise is not my...

Ibsen's Brand Jaspistos IN COMPETITION NO. 2114 you were asked for some advertising copy ingenious- ly and incongruously linking an imaginary product with a famous name in the...

Raymond Keene IN a new novel, Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw (Harvill), by Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic, the central protagonist, chess grandmaster Carl Haffner (modelled...

A first prize of £30 and a bottle of Graham's award-winning Late- Bottled Vintage Port for the first correct solution opened on 4 January, with two runners-up prizes of £20 (or,...

Down under is tops all round Simon Barnes WITH the year on its last knockings, it seems that we must come to terms with the fact that Australia is the greatest nation on...

Dear Mary. . Q. Increasingly, I find that many men of my father's generation are incapable of holding a conversation without having one hand buried in a trouser pocket,...