T HE. apparent thaw in the relations between France on the one hand and Great Britain and the United States on the other may be merely a tactical move designed to restore at...

IN THE POST-BUDGET PHASE, home political life became interesting once more. The threat of a three-day rail strike abated till after Easter, when a joint meeting of union...

No. 7033 Established 1828 FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1963

R UMOURS of a great political battle in the Kremlin are this time reinforced (though not by any means confirmed) by hints in the official Italian Communist press, which...

AI a time when the British press is as ..unpopular with the general public as it has ever been and may soon find itself threatened with restrictive legislation, it might be...

T HE first meeting of the eight-nation SEATO council to be held in Europe may be proving useful as a meeting-ground for Western Foreign Ministers, but it is doubtful whether the...

C ANADA'S electors have almost made up their minds this time. It is a pity they did riot do so completely and give Mr. Lester Pearson the extra six or seven seats his Liberal...

I N a nation which is by common consent post- Christian, it is .a matter of some surprise to those on the fringe of the Church that it still 'commands enough public interest to...

By JOHN COLE I TT has all the shape of an inevitable tragedy, perhaps one should have known that a strike over the Beeching Plan would follow cer- tainly from the strike over...

From SARAH GAINHAM BONN B ora the events of the week in Bonn—neither of which occurred in Bonn itself—were non- events which appeared to solve problems of weight but which in...

By JOHN VAIZEY 'THE dominant fact about education since the war has been its rapid expansion. Expen- diture on education is something like nine times What it was in 1938 and the...

By KENNETH MACKENZIE D EAR S1R,—You, and the surprising thousands of others who have decided to go to South Africa, have, of course, been told all about the sunshine, the...

in the week, nor the first hints of a thaw in Paris, did anything to lessen the con- fusion which characterised the talks at Koenigs- winter. The British guests were given more...

'true course of history' is indeed to be realised, the US Administration will have to take its courage into both hands and offer to put some genuine political content into the...

was, naturally, Mr. Richard Cross- man's. Having confessed that, because he had at last backed a winner, he found an ox sitting on his tongue, he thereupon summoned up all his...

r"1" HE annual Anglo-German Conference at Koenigswinter, started in 1950 by Frau Lilo Milchsack and sustained in its independence by her formidable combination of energy, grace,...

been made, of course. I heard Mr. Adlai Stevenson in Bonn make the same sort of state- ment as he had made in London a few days be- fore about multilateralism, and indicate...

uncertainty, confusion, depression and indeed dread in which the talking came to a stop, some- thing emerged. Speaker after speaker had talked of Atlanticisation and the like....

the conference began. Certainly the pros- perity of Western Germany is great and is still growing,. if rather more slowly because of the acute shortage of manpower. But the...

week. It was nine years since I had last been to Koenigswinter, and things were simpler then. The menace from the East was simple and our protection against it was simple; and...

TREMBLE, DAMMIT! By HERB GREER J UST over twenty years ago, on December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and his research team In Chicago raised paper cups of Chianti wine in a toast:...

SIR,—Your leader on Arab-Israeli politics (Spectator. March 29) discounts the possibility of Egypt having missiles as a Levantine rumour from the bazaars of Beirut; clears Bonn...

been replaced with fission. The i mminence is even greater than the magnitude of the disaster. What could be more distasteful than to see Lord Russell on the plinth at...

its proper authority by confining as members' exhibitions to the ample Diploma Gallery, and letting its main galleries—where its 1 ,.inage is created—to instructive causes and...

de haut en bas' about Mr. Clive Barnes than Mr. Barnes did for his about Mr. Robert Helpmann. He simply repeats the dreary old insinuation that a mere ballet critic's views are...

do. Even if your critic had not already given argument enough in support of his condemnation of the ballet, Mr. Kersley's dismissal of any 'outraged moral reaction' would be...

Nevile Wallis Middle Eastern Polities Conrad Jameson 'Flektra' John Percival, Oleg Kerensky ChaWove Airfield Lady Rothen stein ` Oh What a Lovely War' A. Comerford Good Food...

SIR, —Can nothing be done to dissuade shirt manu - facturers from the exasperation they cause to the public or from the waste of materials, time an d money in which they...

which I gave a very condensed account of the present state of the Chalgrove question. The present situation is, of course, only the latest chapter of a history that was at its...

Bamber Gascoigne writes fully about Joan Littlewood's new musical on its West End transfer I trust that he will pay some attention to a feature of this brilliant produc- tion...

war conducted against my Guide to Eating Places by Leslie Adrian for the second year running. What else can the reason be for stating that 'it is taken to be a one-man book,...

of the Good Food Guide, 1963-64, may I make a correction of fact? Mr. Adrian says that Mr. Postgate and his volun - tary 'inspectors' (why the quotation marks? TheY do inspect,...

refrain fro Poor,' who overwhelmingly voted Tory? And they mg most, especially those who have retired and ar, e living on small pensions or fixed incomes, and fi ing it more and...

Two Visionaries By NEVILE WALLIS BEAUTIFULLY assembled by the Waddington Galleries, the re- trospective exhibition of Jack Butler Yeats, the poet's brother, may well be a...

Ancient and Modern By BAMBER GASCOIGNE The Tempest. (Stratford-upon- Avon.)—Measure for Mea- sure. (Old Vic.)—Naked. (Royal Court.) ACADEMIC critics of every hue have always...

Vernacular By TERENCE BENDIXSON ACROSS the street from Bur- lington House a crisp new French Railways House is neither brilliant nor sensational, but it is interesting for...

Two's Company By ISABEL QUIGLY Two for the Seesaw (director: Robert Wise) is almost a duo- logue, with two big parts and no one else around for more than a minute or two. And...

Inflation By CLIFFORD HANLEY Leaving Miss Keeler aside (no great effort is required for this), I was curiously fascinated by what the BBC did with Lunik IV, in a special,...

By ANTHONY GLYN T HREE. afternoons a week the crowd gathers at the Estrada Variety Theatre, a grim grey building overlooking the frozen Moscow River. They come to watch the...

Bagehot Revised B Y ANGUS M AUDE T HERE is much talk at present of constitutional reform, and in particular of making the House of Commons more powerful and efficient. Not for...

Sixty Days that Shook the World. By J. Benoist- Mechin. Edited with a preface by Cyril Falls. Translated by Peter Wiles. (Cape, 45s.) To read this book will mean for some...

I'm already forgetting the social details of Her- mosa, the African State which is the setting of Unity's Children, but I'll remember Unity for some time. On a remarkable page 1...

C. H. Philips. (Allen and Unwin, 25s.) Politics and Society in India. Edited by THE persistence of parliamentary democracy in India, when in so many of the new States of Asia...

The Novels of Jane Austen. By Robert Liddell. (Longmans, 25s.) MR. LIDDELL'S new study of Jane Austen ' s novels is one for the initiate rather than for the novice; but his...

Monks and Monasteries of the Near East. By Jules Leroy. Translated by Peter Collin. (Harrap, 25s.) IT is a paradox that some of the greatest re- ligious art has been produced...

Experimental Drama. Edited by William A. Armstrong. (Bell, 16s.) J. C. TREWIN, in his contribution to this collec- tion of lectures in book form, is concerned to point out the...

I've gathered nine cats about me Instead of one life. I can face Eighteen eyes without suspicion— Lie safe on these vitreous humours. Smooth talk is a foreign body visitors...

The Strange Story of the Great Whale, Also Known as Big Mae. By Erib Kos. Trans- lated by Lovett F. Edwards. (Methuen, 15s.) IN February of 1953 the Belgrade newspaper Politika...

By CUSTOS S Emma thoughts in Throgmorton Street brought buyers into both the gilt-edged and the equity markets. The gilt-edged market had every reason to be more confident, for...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IF my second thoughts on-the Budget are slightly more critical, it is not because 1 have shifted one inch in my t..-J opinion of Mr. Maudling. As compared...

A Smell of Fresh Lemon By ELIZABETH DAVID find I can even believe in eating again so long as I avoid thinking of things like oxtail and sausages and sauerkraut-ouch--and dwell...

By LoTIIBURY T HE setback in profits from the Ross Group for the year to September 30, 1962, was ex- Pected. Pre-tax profits dropped from £1.66 Mahon to £679,000, but the...

By LESLIE ADRIAN SALESMEN and advertising ex- ecutives are proud of the kind of nagging approach to selling that they call the 'hard sell.' Sales resistance is there to be...