Thursday, August 5: Brian Faulkner and General Tuzo's top secret talks at No 10 resulted in an immediate increase of British troops to Ulster, while James Callaghan thought a...

Internment in Northern Ireland had become a necessity if the attempt to preserve some degree of order in the streets of Belfast and Londonderry was to be sustained. A ban on all...

Mr Justice Griffiths in granting the Oz editors bail and fixing it at E100 each plus two sureties of E100 has prevented the law from making too much of an ass of itself. His...

starting this week on how some politicians of yesteryear (not yesterday's men) rose to power. They are a motley lot comprising Baldwin, Roosevelt, Khrushchev, Mussolini, Nehru,...

Jury disservice TONY PALMER At the risk of boring my two or three remaining readers into insensibility, I feel that there is one aspect of the Oz trial which has remained...

There is a small and well identified group of professional journalists whose chief job it is to report trials at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey). These accredited...

Save the microbe BERNARD DIXON Conservationists are infuriating people. They speak with that uncompromising tenor of certainty found elsewhere only among schoolmasters and...

Summer thaw KULDIP, NAYAR New Delhi Suddenly there is sumer in Indo-British relations. The frozen attitude of Indians, born of the feeling that Britain is always pro-Pakistan,...

The history of Mr Wells BENNY GREEN Twenty-five years ago this week I picked up a morning newspaper and read of the death of H. G. Wells. I was shocked and saddened, shocked...

The Press Council has upheld a complaint brought before it by Miss Livia Gollancz (on behalf of Victor Gollancz Ltd) against The Spectotor for publishing a review of Lord...

In the box at Old Trafford DAVID BENEDICTUS "What's on at Old Trafford then?" "The Test Match." " It starts today, does it?" "No. It started last Thursday." To...

"The kind of book which Dr Arnold might have written had he taken to drink," wrote Hugh Kingsmill of Frederic W. Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little*. And certainly Eric (first...

Untimely Thoughts Maxim Gorky (Garnstone Press £2.25) When I was first taken before my interrogator in Lubyanka prison, just over twenty years ago, he began with an ominous...

Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice Brian Pullan (Blackwell £6.50) By the close of the sixteenth century the freedom of Venice from popular disturbance was becoming a subject of...

The Blind Owl Sadegh Hedayat (Calder and Boyars £1.60) White Dog Romain Gary (Cape £2.50) Now that everybody is abroad on holiday, the moment has surely come to look at the...

International Law and Order Georg Schwarzenberger (Stevens e5.75) The Scientific Study of Foreign Policy James N. Rosenau (The Free Press New York Collier-Macmillan London)...

Booksellers who deal in secondhand and rare books will be in the news next month when the International Antiquarian Book Fair opens in London, This branch of the book trade has...

Hamlet and Spamlet KENNETH HURREN It is a rare generation that lacks its very own Hamlet to take lovingly to its heart, forsaking all others till age do them part. For this...

Tetley's tediums ROBIN YOUNG Glen Tetley's Field Figures was part of the Queen Mother's 71st birthday treat on its first performance at Covent Garden. It was impossible to...

Not making it CHRISTOPHER HUDSON Villain (' X ' ABC 1) is another moulting wreath on the coffin of the British gangster film. Richard Burton, piggily unpleasant as Vic Dakin...

THEATRE Opening in London: John Osborne's new play, West of Suez, with Ralph Richardson and Jill Bennett in the cast, at the Royal Court, July 17. Worth seeing in London: Ian...

Paymaster-General Lord Eccles, Minister with responsibility for the Arts, would seem also about to assume a more specific responsibility for crafts. When the Lords reassemble he...

Sir : 1 do not think there will be any good come out of Mr Davies' visit to UCS any more than the visits of Mr Benn and Mr Wilson. Your Parliamentary Correspondent, Mr Hugh...

because UCS has not been afforded a further hand-out, surely begs the question. What has to be asked is not whether UCS is viable, palpably it isn't, but whether Scotland itself...

Sir: If, as Mr Christopher Booker sugge„sts, not many people will read Nick Stacey's Who Cares, I hope the few who do will be Anglican clergy. Indeed, perhaps some benefactor...

Sir: Your misprint poll seems to be swinging in your favour, but among the few of August 7 there is, in the ' Diary of the Year,' "Mr Health . . . left Cowes for Chequers. . ....

Sir: I did not comment on Benny Green's piece about bookshops (June 12) at the time because it observed inescapable facts rather than made unjustified criticism. As your...

Sir: Is the great British public fooled by the union's comic charade of card voting? Last week, Mr Clive Jenkins said, "The miners, the post office workers and the transport...

Sir: 1 find myself in agreement with every word of criticism which Paul Foot levels at Mr Wilson in his review of the latter's memoirs. There is, however, a point which puzzles...

Sir: In your Notebook yotl assert that you fear (and know) that the publication in our col umns of a recent article bY Andrew Alexander "was regarded in the highest Telegraph...

Sir: Now that my critics, under the guise of high-minded literary prin ciples, have indulged their petty, personalised and, in some cases, paranoic spleen, perhaps I can answer...

Sir: So British Rail are now trying to outbid the British Road Federation in their demands for a motorway network. The British Rail advertisement (July 24) speaks in terms of...

Sir: What is the function of a drama critic? According to your own Kenneth Hurren, ' a worthwhile piece " of fringe theatre still deserves half the space he gives to a West End...

Sir: I find myself in the unusual but happy position of being able to write and congratulate you over your present objective and fairminded comments about Harold Wilson, his...

Sir: Having read John Rowan Wilson's article on matoke (July 24) which he says "has all the delicacy of flavour of last week's boiled potatoes at a British public school," I...

Lone yachtsman Chay Blyth has returned from his circumnavigation of the world in fine condition. He looks a better advertisement for British bully and hard tack than for the...

Do you know that if you ask your local bank manger to buy a few shares he sends your order to his head office who in turn tells a stockbroker to fulfil this individual...

Eric Heffer, the forty-nine year old Labour MP for the Walton division of Liverpool, boasted in the House of Commons last week that he started life as the butcher's errand boy...

I find very puzzling a statement such as that made by Mr Mark Carlisle, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Office, that the present "prison popula tion " on May 31...

Royalty did all I could have asked last Saturday, but the gutless opposition melted away and left him a useless 11 to 4 on — if only a similar situation had developed in William...

"Such a glamorous life . . . . all those delicious meals," sigh friends to me. What, I wonder, would they have made of the following, to which I was subjected in the presumed...

Having found myself involved in the internal politics of the London theatre, it has become part of my ritual in the last few weeks to move, fairly latish at night, from the...

As an instant tradition, so to speak, the Game Fair can have few rivals. It's hard to believe, now, that it began only in the 1950s. Longleat, Shotover, Stamford, the stately...