'We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' Oscar Wilde A the Conservatives met in Blackpool for their annual conference, Mr William Hague, the Leader of...

Telephone: 0171-405 1706; Fax 0171-242 0603 NET LOSS M r Blair now has two patron saints for his project. Diana, Princess of Wales, had been co-opted as the symbol of...

Mr Hague saw what the press did to Mr Major. He won't let them do it to him BRUCE ANDERSON t has always been amusing to observe the way in which Tory leaders' party con-...

WILLIAM HAGUE Blackpool N ancy is now in her nineties and has been watching our conference proceedings on television. I have thought about her a lot this week, especially when...

Reflections on being referred to by Alan Clark MP FRANK JOHNSON T he 600 Irishmen whose deaths were Mr Alan Clark's answer this week to the Irish question should not take it...

Stephan Shakespeare on the version of our past now taught in the schools over which David Blunkett is the latest politician to preside IN YEARS to come, children sitting on...

WILLIAM'S NOT TOO BAD REALLY Derek Draper, former New Labour apparatchik, sees hope for the Tories yet Blackpool THIS is not just a party in shock, it is a party in denial....

WHERE'S THEIR MANDELSON? Sion Simon, another ex-New Labour apparatchik, looks at the would-be New Tories, and is unimpressed IT IS a measure of Labour's relentless effi-...

William Oddie wonders why Mr Blair is clinging to his powers over the Church of England BENEATH the mystic device of Power to the People, Tony Blair is actively devolving...

'YOU'RE getting like Cruden,' said my husband when I told him that I'd found an even more risibly mistaken reading of Gladstone's handwriting in Roy Jenkins's agreeable...

William Cash on how the real hero's past caught up with Hollywood's new epic Los Angeles IT'S ALWAYS good to see Hollywood making an expensive fool of itself. A $70 million...

Michael Heath

Andrew Gimson says that, in voting Herr Kohl out, Germans would move towards self-government Berlin HOW did they let Helmut Kohl get away With it? This may be the question...

Nicholas Farrell on an attempt to exonerate a Briton who spied for Russia in war and Cold War A NEW book from Random House, the giant American publishing conglomerate, has a...

How to save yourself 51 trips to the library . . . or over £41 on The Spectator If you're forced to share The Spectator with fellow students, then you'll know how difficult it...

Norman Tebbit on what he sees as a short-term, modish plan for his party's revival IN these columns last week, Mr Simon Brocklebank-Fowler demonstrated that delayed...

Simon Sebag Montefiore exposes the role of Sinn Fein's founder in an Irish persecution of Jews THERE IS a myth that the last anti- Semitic pogrom in the British Isles was in...

The Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize is awarded annually to the writer best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or peo- ple. The award will not be for travel writing in the...

Have you heard the one about General Stoughton and the floozie? PAUL JOHNSON '7Fhe trouble with the world', said my Old friend Vicky, the cartoonist, 'is that there are not...

The fib that never fails to seduce investors: 'This time it's different' (oh, no, it isn't) CHRISTOPHER FILDES ONLY the other day, everybody believed what the market was...

NOW I know what Gordon Brown and his small team of chosen sidekicks mean by transparency. For this I must thank the can- did cameras of ITV which this week gave us We Are the...

THE Stock Exchange must tell itself that a disastrous rehearsal means a good first night. Then it can look forward to its new style of trading when the curtain goes up on Monday...

THIS time last year Barclays was busy boosting BZW — scattering seven-figure cheques like toffee papers as it hired and fired staff, renting a marble penitentiary in DocIdands,...

IT IS clear to me that Martin Taylor, Bar- clays' chief executive, is evolving a financial version of the Oozlum Bird. This explains why Barclays is now flying round and round...

BEFORE our eyes and ears just now is a superb example of what Smith called super- money. This is a currency printed in the stock market when times are good and enabling its...

Orwell's 'generation of unteachables hanging around our necks like a necklace of corpses'. Several of the 'radical movements' which she and her Guardian colleagues reported...

Sir: Victoria Brittain's response (Letters, 4 October) to Stephen Glover's article failed to address key issues such as whether she aided and abetted Mr Kojo Tsikata in his...

Sir: I do not know how much of the rest of Mark Honigsbaum's article on 'Diana and the tabloids: the real story' (27 September) has been sucked out of his thumb, but I can say...

Michael Cole now that a vacancy has occurred. This would probably leave room for three more letters a week. D.J. Pimblett Rose Cottage, Horbury, W. Yorkshire

Sir: How kind of Mr Damant (Letters, 20 September) to set me right once more with the aid of his trusty informant who is quot- ing custom and law in modern Germany. In Austria...

Sir: My old friend Paul Johnson miscon- strues my remark in the James Bryce Lec- ture (And another thing, 27 September). My point was not at all that many Ameri- cans believe...

Sir: Pace Petronella Wyatt on New Labour's Brighton champagne (`The love of power', 4 October), I well remember my father complaining in the mid-Forties that he could hardly get...

Why I believe Ms Brittain was more than a mere postbox STEPHEN GLOVER L ast Friday the Guardian appointed an ombudsman, John Willis, who will look into the Victoria Brittain...

Foreign affairs in the age of Jane Bull, and the raw veg. of new Britain PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE E ncouragingly early in my journalistic life — about 1954 — I was invited to...

My first countess Bevis Hillier ELIZABETH LONGFORD: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY by Frances Makower Hodder, £17.99, pp. 212 C hristmas comes but once a year and when it comes it...

Theodore Dalrymple STAYING SANE: HOW TO MAKE YOUR MIND WORK FOR YOU by Raj Persaud Metro, £17.99, pp. 388 hat is sanity? As with poetry, it is easier to say what it isn't than...

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C. D. C. Armstrong THE WOMAN WHO TOOK POWER IN THE PARK by Lorna Siggins Mainstream, £14.99, pp. 240 M ary Robinson has recently resigned as President of Ireland in order to...

Jonathan Cecil MOAB IS MY WASHPOT by Stephen Fry Hutchinson, £16.99, pp. 320 by Stephen Fry Hutchinson, £16.99, pp. 320 A quaveringly epicene old don in the Cambridge-Forster...

John Bowen STANLEY KUBRICK by John Baxter HarperCollins, £20, pp. 399 T he set of a Kubrick movie does not seem to have been a happy place. No jokes, not even on Dr...

Caroline Moore • ECHOES OF WAR by William Riviere Sceptre, £16.99, pp. 634 E choes of War is a haunting but unfor- givably self-indulgent novel — though my intermittent...

Helen Osborne WAY OF THE WORLD: THE FORGOTTEN YEARS, 1995-6 by Auberon Waugh Century, £15.99, pp. 211 J ust how long can Way of the World sur- vive? Our watchdogs of the...

Hilary Corke I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE EVERYWHERE, WITH EVERYONE, ONE TO ONE, ALWAYS, FOREVER, NOW by Damien Hirst Booth-Clibbom, £59.95, pp. 334 A nd, one might well...

William Scammell TIMEQUA10E by Kurt Vonnegut Cape, £15.99, pp. 219 K urt Vonnegut wants to be liked. To this end he confides in his readers as he prepares to get the show on...

A choice of over 100,000 books — including those reviewed in this issue Telephone: 0541 557288 Facsimile: 0541 557225 E-mail: telegraph @bms.ftech.co.ok We accept payment by...

The business of blockbusters Giles Waterfield on the drawbacks (and bonuses) of large temporary exhibitions T he present furore over Sensation at the Royal Academy is a fine...

Martin Gayford explains why he finds the Pre-Raphaelites a terrible bore E veryone loves the Pre-Raphaelites, at any rate here in England. A book on the subject is one of those...

Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, till 7 January 1998) Dada for the masses Roger Kimball S eeing the huge new retrospective of...

German Expressionism (Palazzo Grassi, Venice, till 11 January 1998) Venezia da Stato a Mito (Giorgio Cini Foundation, till 30 November) In Venice for pleasure Robin Simon P...

Cartier 1900-1939 (British Museum, till 1 February 1998) Alive with sparkles Andrew Lambirth T he firm of Cartier was founded in Paris in 1847, but until 1900 it operated...

Are you sitting comfortably? Auction houses conduct regular 20th-century furniture sales, as Leslie Geddes-Brown reports O nce the only buyers of 20th-century furniture at...

Rigoletto (Scottish Opera) Children at risk Michael Tanner B oth of them operas about anxious adults and the innocent but easily corrupt- ed children in their care, Rigoletto...

Father's Day (12, selected cinemas) Remembering a superb technician Mark Steyn D orothy Kingsley died last week. I don't suppose more than one in a hundred million moviegoers...

What's the best? Peter Phillips T he proposed televising of the Gramo- phone Awards ceremony (ITV, 28 Octo- ber) brings to fruition something I mentioned on the Today...

The Invention of Love (National) Maddie (Lyric) Kat and the Kings (Tricycle) Stoppard triumphs Sheridan Morley F or those of us, maybe just those of me, who believe that Tom...

Star wit Michael Vestey G ore Vidal once said, 'Wisdom is deepest platitude.' He must have been thinking of himself. He is always entertain- ing, of course; those who talk...

Those magnificent men Gavin Stamp These were whimsically ridiculous heav- ier-than-air machines held aloft over Victo- rian urban landscapes by giant rotors or by blasts of...

Wish I was there Simon Hoggart T he first volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time begins with a metaphor which establishes the theme for the entire work. He...

Generosity of spirit Robin Oakley O nce a Front Row Man, always a Front Row Man. If you've been one of the fraternity which sprinkles iron fillings on its cornflakes, it...

Dirtiest hour of our time Taki hate to say, I told you so, but I did. It took less than a month for those lunch- bucket pilferers that constitute the British Fourth Estate to...

It's so embarrassing Leanda de Lisle n his sermon at the Labour party confer- ence Tony Blair told us we must all be more giving. Not in the sense of giving more money to the...

Less is more Andrew Robson T wenty-four hours of continuous bridge playing 165 duplicated hands may not be everybody's idea of fun, but The 1997 Young Chelsea Bridge Marathon...

faintly depress- ing about the prospect of eating in a hotel dining-room. It often lacks the frisson of dining in a restaurant, and conjures up visions of silent couples, even...

DEBATE still rages as to whether Paul Morphy, the mid-19th century chess genius who took the world by storm, only to retire after the briefest of careers, was the great- est...

ISLE OF RA L j • ••:•E YALTV.0101%11150 SLE OF i U RA SAM kIAL? KOICH wiagl COMPETITION By popular request Jaspistos IN COMPETITION NO. 2003 you were invited to supply a...

You are invited to take from 'Jabberwocky' eight rhyme couples, not the actual words Carroll uses but words rhyming with them, e.g. 'loaves' for ‘toves' etc., and present a...

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A first prize of £30 and a bottle of Graham's Late Bottled Vintage 1991 Port for the first correct solution opened on 27 October, with two runners-up prizes of £20 (or, for UK...

You read it here first Simon Barnes THE wise sports reporter works exclusively from hindsight. Your forward-looking material should be very strong but full of Perfectly poised...

Q. I seek your guidance on the most appropriate way to answer a rather awk- Ward question. It concerns those rare occasions when one is occupied in the bathroom; the telephone...