The inner city before being spoilt by the poll tax body of Pauline Reade was found The on Saddleworth Moor 24 years after it was buried there. Ian Brady confessed that he had...

HE Prince of Wales is right to speak out Publicly on matters concerning the welfare of his future subjects, as he did when he recently visited the slums of Spitalfields. On such...

may find it hard to get through to us. If they cannot reach us on 01-405 1706, they should try 01-405 5041. British Telecom have no notion of when the faults will be righted. As...

COAL FACES THE FUTURE But if all this has changed, the basic structure of theindustry has not. It remains as it was ordained by the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act of 1946....

A nother London walk for me and my dog, Jubilee, is to Holland Park, which is a quite different experience again from Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park — and not only because it...

Perhaps poll tax will once again prove the last Straw AUBERON WAUGH 'could not help smiling at what I read in my Daily Telegraph last Saturday. Jack Straw, who is an...

The poor are now younger and more able-bodied than before. Ferdinand Mount discusses ways for the Government to meet the Prince of Wales's concern for the inner cities THE...

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the appointment of a judge that has enraged the liberal establishment Washington ROBERT Bork is a curious choice for the Supreme Court. While...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY — Save 15% on the Cover Price! Please enter a subscription to The Spectator I enclose my cheque for f (Equivalent SUS & Eurocheques accepted) RATES 12...

Tony Samstag on the secret arms deals of the Swedes and Norwegians Oslo SCANDINAVIAN innocence is dead. It was shot down by the still unknown assas- sins who murdered Olof...

THE good and the bad quality of the new House of Commons came out strongly on Tuesday night. Members of all parties united to censure the Home Secretary because he had, as they...

Norman Stone discovers a period piece in a volume of letters ONE curiosity about living in Oxfordshire, as I do, is that you come across, quite often, the relics of empire....

Michael Trend visits a comprehensive boarding school threatened with closure CONSTABLE country: deep in the heart of sylvan Suffolk with its green meadows rolling down to the...

Charles Clover is surprised to hear his neighbourhood described as appalling THE day Prince Charles came to Princelet Street I left for work at 7.30 a.m., like all good...

The press: Paul Johnson greets the sale of Today with a welcome — and a warning RUPERT Murdoch's purchase of Today has certainly shown there's no monopoly of humbug anyway....

Who killed the Canary? I, said the Old Lady, By methods deft and shady, I killed the Canary. . . . Certainly the great Canary Wharf project, the plan to build an alternative...

ANDREW Warburg, settling down this month to three years as a guest of Her Majesty, has much to answer for. It was his 'company, Norton Warburg — known as `Norty' Warburg to...

Sir Michael's short-priced loser comes galloping home for Sir Kit CHRISTOPHER FILDES its streets are. The spectacle of the Clydesdale and Northern banks being sold into...

NOTION to be offered, impartially, to Michael Foot and Norman Tebbit: is the community charge a semi-house-trained poll-tax?

Sir: In your issue for 6 June, I concluded my paragraph on my voting intentions by stating that, 'if I lived in Cambridge it would be a duty to vote Conservative, but I don't so...

Downs which was built by his father and which presumably he inherited. He and his fellow writers, including Peter Jay, do not understand the aspirations of ordinary people who...

with an open mouth'. Chekhov considered it a writer's function to 'intercede for the guilty'. 'Should writers think?' by John Mortimer speaks up for those who feel guilty about...

Sir: Hugely though I enjoyed John Mor- timer's performance on 27 June as The Man They Cannot Gag, there is, I think, a reason he may have overlooked to explain why he and his...

Sir: I looked in vain in the article 'Inner city of dreadful night', 27 June, by Mr Richard West (which, although purporting to be on the inner cities, relied for much of its...

Sir: Writing recently of a fracas in New York (High life, 13 June) in which hysteric- al women tried to debag him, Taki said: 'They only managed to get two of my cuff-links and...

Sir: This fellow Nigel Dempster mentioned in Taki's column (20 June) as having been present at Sir James Goldsmith's election night party — surely it can't be the same Dempster...

Sir: What joy to read Michael Trend on the exasperating subject of British Telecom (4 July). BT cut me off for three months because I withheld payment of a surprising- ly large...

Sir: I was interested by the review of The Arcrirnboldo Effect (Books, 30 May 1987). The art gallery of the City Palace in Jaipur has a couple of examples of this genre, one an...

Sir: That old fogey called Johnson (The media, 27 June) is as inaccurate as his fellow journalists. I have not 'whined' at a pub- lishing takeover by any American firm. In a...

Sir: Mary Soames says that we should all now surrender to modernised church ser- vices (Diary, 4 July) because it is simply too much trouble to resist them. She supports her...

Book of Imperative Cooking Digby Anderson In a witty but uncompromising style, Spectator defies „hi:, current Andersons p e t trend of popular food columns and...

IT IS the house after the house where I was born to which I return in fondest re- membering. The long narrow garden di- vided down its length by three strips of grass, ideal as...

Into the blue Patrick Leigh Fermor THE SONGLINES by Bruce Chatwin Cape, £10.95 B nice Chatwin has given us a fascinat- ing, extraordinary and rather puzzling book, fascinating...

Denis Hills DAYS OF JUDGMENT by Sir Peter Allen William Kimber, .£13.50 S ir Peter Allen is a survivor from Uganda. As principal of the Uganda law school, then chief...

Frances Partridge CHARLESTON PAST AND PRESENT by Quentin Bell, Angelica Garnett, Henrietta Garnett and Richard Shone The Hoganh Press, £5.95 I must declare an interest in...

Laurence Lerner THE LETTERS OF ALFRED LORD TENNYSON: Vol II, 1851- 1870 edited by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr. Clarendon Press, PIO T ennyson hated writing letters....

Aidan Higgins PLAYING FOR TIME by Jeremy Lewis Collins, £12.95 I n the damp kingdom of the unfunny phrase, presided over by posturing Ken- neth Williams, fawning Frankie...

She sits beside his bed in the winter dusk. Just for a while she can do nothing more. Doctor and priest have been. His sons will come By a night train. She keeps the curtains...

Brian Martin THE MORAL AND POLITICAL WRITINGS OF MAHATMA GANDHI, VOLUME III edited by Raghavan Iyer OUP, .£55 T hose whose imagination was caught by the film Gandhi but who...

Francis King PARTINGS by Leonid Borodin, translated by David Floyd Collins Harvill, £10.95 A t the International PEN Congress in Lugano last May, a French delegate refer- red...

David Nokes FAMILY FORTUNES: MEN AND WOMEN OF THE ENGLISH MIDDLE-CLASS 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall Hutchinson, £25, £10.95 A LASTING RELATIONSHIP:...

Jeffrey Bernard ON BOXING by Joyce Carol Oates Bloomsbury, £9.95 T here shouldn't be anything much more extraordinary about a woman writing a book about boxing than there is...

Photography Monument to wool Francis Hodgson Through the Mill: The Story of Yorkshire Wool in Photographs by Ian Beesley (National Museum of Photography, Film and Television,...

Nature notes Noel Malcolm 0 ne of the complaints I often hear about Radio 3 is that although it pumps out classical music from dawn till dusk, it has almost no programmes...

Choral Babel Peter Phillips h e Dutch town of Arnhem is currently experiencing a fit of amateur choral sing- ing. The Tenth International Choir Festiv- al, held once every...

Ceramic Art of the Renaissance (British Museum, till 20 September) Masterly maiolica Tanya Harrod T he fluctuating fortunes of maiolica in the art market form a curious...

White of the Eye ('18', various Cannons) Stylish slaughter Hilary Mantel T his film is taken from the novel Mrs White by Margaret Tracey; it begins with a startling and...

Selling to the smart set Susan Moore E ver since the likes of Somerset Maugham, Margot Fonteyn, Kirk Douglas and Lady Churchill stood on their seats in evening dress and...

Student promise Giles Auty A recent conversation reminded me of the time when I, too, was of student age. The other day a senior British artist ex- plained to me what he...

Cash and carry Taki 0 n the first rained-out Monday of the Wimbledon fortnight, I went to the Van- derbilt tennis club for a practice session indoors. While I waited for a...

Pilger unbuttoned Peter Levi T he North Oxfordshire village of Stonesfield not only lies on the forgotten historical frontier between Wessex and Mercia, but when we switch to...

Tripping up Alice Thomas Ellis I had a medical check-up a while ago and, if I am to believe the man in charge, the entire staff of the laboratory where they do these things...

I HAVE been pondering two recent ex- periences of sherry which are very hard to reconcile. The other day I took part in a big fino tasting at Decanter magazine — one of those...

£9.95) is now on sale.

Bohemia. Pink venetian blinds and neon tubing now map out old Fitzrovia and Soho; Portobello is dwindling into gentility; and who knows what dark corner Terence Conran plans to...

Carry on Jaspistos I N Competition No. 1479 you were given the first line of an old song and invited to carry on. I'm reliably told this was a favourite song of Evelyn Waugh....

Overflow Raymond Keene o r weeks, nothing of great importance has been taking place. This calm has given me the chance to proceed with my historic- al analysis of great...

for one or more weeks of the competition and crossword may be posted together under one cover addressed 'Competition Entries' provided each entry is enclosed in a separate...

The Prime Minister of Belgium recently gave Mrs Thatcher a billiard cue. There seems to have been no accompanying official speech or letter, not a word of explanation. You are...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers Dictionary, value £13.95 — ring the words 'Chambers Dictionary' above) for the first...

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