0 n the day of the Prime Minister's tenth anniversary in power Mr John Smith captured, in a by-election, the Vale of Glamorgan for Labour from the Conserva- tives with a 12 per...

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone 01-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 242 0603 BREAKING EASTERN PROMISE T he British Goverment's pusillanimous and...

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And now for something not completely different NOEL MALCOLM I t would be churlish not to salute the extraordinary nature of Labour's by- election victory at the Vale of...

I have always rather liked David Owen. For all his self-evident faults, working with him, at least on the 1987 General Election campaign, could be challenging and re- warding;...

Next month, Poles will have real votes for the first time since the war. Timothy Garton Ash follows the election trail Warsaw POLAND has taken a high dive into deep water,...

A TELEGRAM from Vienna of May 6th announces that the Czar intends to have himself crowned as King of Po- land, and that the laws, or rather, administrative ukases, now pressing...

No US missiles, no US troops? Ambrose Evans - Pritchard reports on the new problem with Germany Washington DOES anybody still believe that the West German government can be...

Charles Glass returns to the country where he had been held hostage Zgharta, Lebanon SOME bulls seek out a place in the ring, where, despite successive woundings by...

PEOPLE, as in, 'Accountancy is peo- ple.' In fact, accountancy is not people, it is arithmetic. All sorts of careers insist that they 'are people', implying that there is human...

Michael Heath

Peter Kemp finds Zimbabwe's prosperity stifled by bureaucracy and threatened by scandal Harare AT FIRST sight it may seem absurd to find parallels between Mrs Thatcher and...

real reasons for British disdain of technology CORELLI Barnett has emerged as the universities' fiercest critic. His view, first expressed in Audit of War (Macmillan, 1986) and...

Nigel Cousins tries to understand the feelings of his Muslim pupils THE record player was turned up full, swelling the music till the large room was filled with strange yet...

from 1995 on the campaign that proved litter kills IT WOULD be fair to say that litter was not central to public affairs in the late 1 980s. In 1989, nobody foresaw the Euro-...

predicament of Britain's oldest Sunday THE troubles of the Observer arising out of its ownership by Tiny Rowland's con- troversial firm Lonrho do not lessen as time passes. It...

WHAT gets into the Confederation of British Industry? I know it is a trade union, but does it have to proceed at the pace of the slowest and the thickest skinned? There are...

THE billboards of Florence carry the Christian Democrats' posters urging the voters to move Italy into the middle of Europe. Personally, I much prefer it where it is. I felt no...

a merger policy with the burden of proof shifted to the bidder, to show that what he proposes is in the Public interest. Picture the long, long trail a - winding through the...

Labour takes the pooper-scooper to its economic policy . . . CHRISTOPHER FILDES C ats still elude the reformers of the Labour party, but dogs are caught. Labour has adopted a...

Sir: For Professor Roy MacGregor-Hast ie (Letters, 29 April) to assert that living standards in Bucharest in 1968 were higher than they were in London suggests that the aspects...

Sir: Mr Lodge (Letters, 25 March) ques- tions my standing to intervene over the clauses concerning water quality and en- forcement in the Water Bill. In strict legal terms the...

Sir: Mr Auberon Waugh (Another voice, 29 April) wonders if the Queen wishes to celebrate, in Russia, the 70th anniversary of 'her cousin's murder'. Hasn't he got that apostrophe...

to you on the proposed reform of the legal profession. I am closely associ- ated with a man who was charged with the murder of his wife less than 20 years ago. The first...

Sir: Whilst Auberon Waugh may or may not be justified in referring to Lord Hail- sham's time on the Woolsack as 'the Brezhnev years' (Another voice, 22 April), I believe Noel...

Sir: In your most generous profile (6 May), you quoted me as claiming to have in - vented stories for Private Eye. Not SO. There may have been errors of fact, misquotations and...

Sir: Auberon Waugh (Another voice, 29 April) ridicules someone who explained to him 'how glasnost and perestroika wer e cunning ploys, hiding a new determinati on on the part of...

Sir: Lord Justice Taylor's commission of inquiry into events at Hillsborough is not a hysterical response to a transient drama, as as Auberon Waugh suggest (Another voice, 6...

Sir: In your Christmas edition you pub- lished Nigel Burke's dictionary of weasel words: 'ABUSE.... "He abused his right to remain silent by remaining silent throughout his...

Sir: Roderick Sale (Letters, 25 February) is incorrect to state that rank is granted by the Ministry of Defence — it is the prerogative of HM the Queen to grant military rank,...

Sir: It is with some delay that I came to know how it happened that I am getting The Spectator every week. I read your letter from 12 January and accompanying discussion with...

Sir: The Spectator's memory is playing tricks. You say (Leader, 6 May) that Mr Hogg and I failed after Hungerford to make the point that you could not legislate against the...

Sir: It is a historian's business to correct mistakes for the record (Letters, 6 May). My last encounter with Graham Greene was not 60 years ago, but perhaps 30. A brief...

N SPECIAL The night our house burnt down Murray Sayle Aikawa, near Tokyo THE night of 19 December last was cold and starry. Our house stood in a clearing in a pine forest...

Investment in Europe Breaching the trade barriers Roland Gribben s Britain a Trojan horse for Japanese invaders? Or are these samurai going to invigorate our industry? The...

Bringing up children Holding on to mama-san's apron strings Ian Buruma M y daughter is half Japanese. That is to say, her mother, my wife, is Japanese. Not that our daughter...

jacuzzis. In his fine house in Osterley the jacuzzi is set in a semi-circle of darkened glass so that he can stare out into his garden without being stared at himself. The...

Gilbert Adair MY LIFE by Marlene Dietrich Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.95, pp.243 A few years ago the Austrian actor- director Maximilian Schell planned a documentary feature...

Logic, grammar, each grey vocable Broke into pieces when the telegram Fell from her faint fingers, dainty bomb Exploding on the carpet like a bubble. No punctuation, though...

J. G. Links FELIX MENDELSSOHN: A LIFE IN LETTERS edited by Rudolph Elvers, translated by Craig Tomlinson Cassell, £14.95, pp.334 hat sort of man was Mendelssohn? His...

Anita Brookner SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: A MEMOIR by John Updike Deutsch, £12.95, pp.245 OUT ON THE MARSH by David Updike Constable, £10.95, pp.168 T enderness of memory is what...

But once out of earshot — it's odd - out of earshot and printshot and screenshot - how implicitly one believes every second depends now on a permutation of cloud or the blowdown...

Anthony Blond THE CLUB: THE JEWS OF MODERN BRITAIN by Stephen Brook Constable, f15.95, pp.464 I have some respect for those who have returned to orthodoxy. (George Steiner)...

O nce upon a time there were three young crows perched side by side on a dead branch of a tall red-ivied tree which stood by itself in the middle of a dirty field. They were...

in New Hampshire Philip Glazebrook A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving Bloomsbury, £12.95, pp.543 I f the argument of this weighty but never ponderous novel was to be...

I f you could implement a single, simple step aimed at improving overall standards of thought and execution in contemporary art, what would you recommend? My own modest...

A Madhouse in Goa (Lyric, Hammersmith) Shouted down Christopher Edwards two distinctly separate parts. Each has a voice to match its contents. The first, Where the action is...

Maggie and the musicians Peter Phillips T he tenth birthday celebrations of the reign of Margaret Thatcher have brought into focus in recent days the endless political sniping...

Mississippi Burning (`18', Odeon Haymarket) Betrayed (`18', selected cinemas) Race for the box office Hilary Mantel W elcome to Mississippi — the Mag- nolia State.' The...

Before they get rich Marcus Berkmann A ll successful bands, sooner or later, find themselves accused of 'selling out'. Such an attitude presumes that pop music is an art form,...

Count me in Taki I chi, ni, san, chi . . . ichi, ni, san, chi. . . . I hear it in my sleep and, come to think of it, throughout the day too. In Japanese it means one, two,...

Back to the keyboard Wendy Cope T here's another kind of screen in my life now, belonging to a new toy that I have christened Strad. Strad has a mind of his own, so I am...

Curtain call Jeffrey Bernard T o Newmarket last week for the 2,000 Guineas and lunch with Charles St George at Sefton Lodge. It would have been a perfect day but for the awful...

Dog's dinner Alice Thomas Ellis I never used to have very strong views about dogs in the dining-room. I know cats who sleep on the dining-table. You sweep them off before...

WHEN Bruce Oldfield was on the Whit- bread Prize committee the year before last, he warmly commended Kazuo Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World. It was an odd sort of...

To enable competitors to economise on postage, entries for one or more weeks of the competition and crossword may be posted together under one cover addressed 'Competition...

A sideways look Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1573 you were asked for an extract from a humorous essay by Wallace Arnold entitled 'A Sideways Look at the Fairer Sex'....

A mongst chess-playing Members of Parliament, past and present, the strongest was Marmaduke Wyvill. In 1847 he was elected MP for Richmond, Yorkshire, a seat he held until 1868,...

You are invited to write a Sun leader (approximately 150 words) commenting on one of three imaginary future events: the voluntary resignation of the Monarchy; the abolition of...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers English Dictionary — ring the word `Dictionary' above) for the first three correct...

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