The twenty-third Annual Report of the Press Council is a v erY interesting document. There is the usual collection of a djudications or complaints, some of them trivial, some of...

The Solzhenitsyn solution Ferdinand Mount There is an awesome sweep about Solzhenitsyn's speech at Harvard, an almost barbaric downrightness which takes the reader by storm,...

pope Paul VI died with most seemly timing. For some months he had been letting it Publicly be known that he did not expect to endure his mortal coil much longer. Recent a...

The education of Montini Peter Nichols Rome Rome The alibi of an awful lot of people asked to l u clge the late Pope Paul VI is that only nistory will tell. His predecessor...

A drab period Nicholas von Hoffman Washington For fifteen years the television news had ended every report of an international crisis with the words,'.. .and in Rome, the...

Any one accustomed to visiting the houses of the poor, either in London or elsewhere, must have felt that there is a lack of decoration inside as well as outside. Some...

C hristopher Booker °11 e of my earliest and most vivid memories e t , Jeremy Thorpe dates back to 1957. Asa Y o ung barrister, he had come down to borset for the weekend after...

Edward Norman The impression is of a Church that is not so much universal as eclectic. Lacking any real uniformity of doctrine or liturgical use, divided over the most...

charity, welcome every sinner that repents but it is always as well to test the depth of their repentance. Similarly, While We d. iscovery may all welcome Mr Callaghan's I of...

reply to the irress Counsellor's defence of Pakistan's 'egal system with regard to Mr Bhutto's trial (22 Ju ly), He has adopted a position which i s only to be expected from an...

Sir: Richard West, in his Notebook (5 August) may well wonder what Andrew Marvell would have thought about the substitution of the name North Humberside for his native East...

Sir: We read that it is impossible to find the £90,000 to divert death-dealing trucks from the factory at Flixton from road to rail. Yet, in this quiet backwater, more than...

Black legion, white soldier Richard West The Last Adventurer: From Biafra to the Sudan Rolf Steiner (Weidenfeld £5.95) Films and books such as The Wild Geese have glamorised...

Germaine Greer il obson-Jobso n: A Glossary of AngloIndian Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell. New Edition edited by William Crooke...

Mary Kenny All the Way to Bantry Bay Benedict Kiely (Gollancz E6.50) As the three people who understood the Schleswig-Holstein question ,realised, a border is an arbitrary...

Jan Morris %lice Peter Lauritzen (Weidenfeld £6.95) Now that Venice is apparently not sinking after all British interest in the Serenissima has resumed a less hysterical tenor,...

Richard Ingrams The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters Edited and introduced by Rupert Hart-Davis (John Murray £6.95) This is an unusual book. It. consists of the correspondence...

Francis King Waiting for Cordelia Herbert Gold (Hutchinson £4.95) There are certain children who, with their world-weary lassitude, their shrivelled -u P appearances and their...

Leos Jandoek: a recollection Vilem Tausky He was born in 1854, the son of a Moravian school master, and christened. Leos Jana6ek. The name was well chosen, for throughout his...

in this situation. This is his most original contribution to the form of opera, an idea which today has gained worldwide recognition among operatic composers. As students he...

Institutional delights John McEwen The dog days are here again as far as the Co mmercial galleries are concerned, so it is a good time for catching up on a few longrunning...

LAW'S Grocer's Manual (J. T. Law) or Xerox copy; Crime mystery iction including A. Christie, J. Creasey, Jules Verne. S. B. Johns, 12 Forest View, Neath. ELSIE OXENHAM books....

Bloody.. . Ted Whitehead Midnight Express (Haymarket) Midnight Express (X) left me wondering which market the producers thought they were aiming at. Who would want to pay to...

Speaking up Richard Ingrams ___-So much gooey syrup is lavished on actors and actresses by the Parkinsons and the Hartys that it was very gratifying w see on e , being...

tax haven Taki Her Levantine father, an acknowledged genius in the art of self-promotion, could 11 ,°t have staged-managed it better. Christina Onassis, the poor little rich...

Going bust Jeffrey Bernard It seems strangely apposite. that on the day the editor asked me to turn my attention to the low life' I should be informed by post that there was a...