The 'tough' language used by the director and governors of the London School of Eco: nomics in the statement accompanying their announcement of the reopening of the school next...

For twenty years the course of Anglo-German relations has largely consisted of tantrums and reconciliations. Mr Wilson's visit to Bonn this week marked the latest attempt at...

While travel in Britain came to a standstill during exceptional snowstorms, the East Ger- mans placed an embargo on land journeys to West Berlin by participants in the West Ger-...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH Most of the babies kissed by Mr Peter Goldman at the famous Orpington by-election are now seven years old, but the memory of that occa- sion...

NORTHERN IRELAND CORNELIUS O'LEARY Belfast—The election here is being fought not on the issue of which party shall govern Ulster, but which faction within the Unionist party,...

AMERICA PETER J. SMITH One of the more interesting, though perhaps inconsequential, developments in the American scientist's love affair with politics over recent years has...

FOREIGN POLICY TIBOR SZAMUELY Richard Milhous Nixon is now the thirty- seventh President of the United States. Perhaps more to the point, he is the sixth President of the...

J. W. M. THOMPSON Life in London may or may not be improved by the proposed bulldozing of a new system of motorways through its streets. I suspect it won't be, but I can tee...

PERSONAL COLUMN NIGEL NICOLSON During a prolonged governors' meeting at a boys' school, my eye wandered to an aphorism framed on the headmaster's wall: 'It is better to run...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS If Heath were always to be photographed from the level or above and not from below his chin level, his face would have more character . . Yehudi Menuhin is...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD To switch on Monday evening from Hancock on BBC 1 to Eleanor Bron and John Fortune on BBC 2. was to measure the spectrum of BBC comedy—from East Cheam,...

From the 'Spectator,' 13 February 1869—Mr. Jus- tice Wines gave judgment on Friday week in the case of the election petition against Mr. J. L. Phipps, Member for Westbury. The...

CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN Thanks to the untiring enterprise of greetings- card manufacturers, the English-speaking peoples no longer have any need to write per- sonal...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN I hope readers of this journal may forgive my returning to the problem of the universities after it has been so brilliantly handled by Messrs Waugh and...

BOOKS MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH `History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.' This is essentially the history of Joyce, the most ordinary and human extra- ordinary and...

C. C. WRIGLEY The People's Republic Obafemi Awolowo (ouP 90s) The political credo of Chief Awolowo, veteran West African statesman, former premier of Western Nigeria, central...

Being beastly BARRY COLE The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B J. P. Donleavy (Eyre and Spottiswoode 35s) The Adventure of Catullus Kelly Andrew Salkey (Hutchinson 27s 6d)...

Poet and peasant MAURICE CAPITANCHIK Only a Game Cla Biert translated by Alan Brown (Peter Owen 30s) A Time to Keep George Mackay Brown (The I logarth Press 21s) Mosby's...

ROBERT BLAKE Lord Acton and His Times David Mathew (Eyre and Spottiswoode 70s) John Morley, Liberal Intellectual in Politics D. A. Hamer (our 65s) As Gladstone moved into what...

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER The Unfinished Hero and other essays Ronald Bryden (Faber 36s) `Even more so is the double-bill I caught on the way back from Manchester, at the Victoria,...

What Maisie Knew Henry James (Bodley Head 32s). The appearance of Volume Six of The Bodley Head Henry James is again due to the editing energies of Leon Edel and it is pleasant...

HILARY SPURLING Venice Preserv'd, which opened last week at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, was until this cen- tury performed as regularly as Shakespeare; and its themes are as...

CINEMA Sweet and sour PENELOPE HOUSTON Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman's Life (Academy One, 'X') Mr Freedom (Cinecenta 3, 'X') On the novel-reader's map of Europe, the Italian...

ART PAUL GRINKE Two exhibitions this week make a convincing attempt to show satire in the round. At the Grosvenor Gallery, Gerald Scarfe has clothed his scabrously pointed...

MUSIC MICHAEL NYMAN Any dedicated anti-modernist—one of the many who condemn today's music as discordant, noisy and tuneless—venturing on to the South Bank last week would have...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT The other day a reader of this page wrote to complain that I was always moaning about dear money. Did I not realise, he said, that 'never in history has...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL The -Rio Tinto Zinc share price has been curi- ously unmoved by the important news that the Bougainville copper mine has completed an agreement for the sale...

CUSTOS Equities are now moving sideways with the -Financial Times ordinary share index stuck between 490 and 500. It has become a Budget- orientated market and rumours of a...

Auberon Waugh praises those Essex students who took part in the Commons Biafra sit-in. He goes on to say : 'The revolu- tionary marxists, as we all know, are char- acterised by...

on the burning ques- tion of the emigration of coloured - people (3 January) was most interesting. On the face of it, nothing more sensible, nothing more humane, than Mr...

Euthanasia Society in the hope that the necessary legislation would be enacted, I should like to congratulate Dr John Rowan Wilson on his excellent article on the subject (7...

Sir: What an appalling prospect for any elderly person heading for hospital if John Rowan Wil- son (7 February) has his way. No longer it seems can the person assume his doctors...

LETTERS From Quintin Hogg MP, David S. Wilson, George Nicholson, Mrs Mary Cummins, L. H. Gilbert, Ken Taylor, James Donaldson, B. Ngwuocha, Colin Brown, U: G. T. Enegren, H. C....

his article (3 January) did not in fact give us common sense about colour. It seemed to me muddled and evasive, when the facts are extremely simple. (1) The majority of people...

Sir: It was long after the event, in the late 'twenties as a young student of English at Uppsala, that I made the acquaintance of Mr Britling, in his own idiom. At about the...

the mentality of ex-colonial officers of his type who have been largely re- sponsible for the Government's disastrous Biafra policy. One thing evident from the letter is that Mr...

others on the subject of Biafra cannot be allowed the pass unchallenged. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the two errors made by the Prime Minister in the recent...

Sir: Those of us who are deeply involved emotionally about the situation in Nigeria are grateful to you• for the generous amount of space you have given to the opposing view-...

says (Letters, 31 January), and they must sometimes take one another's attributions on trust. So he is less than cock- sure in refuting Mr Braby's suggestion that Montagu Butler...

Sir: Mr Giles Playfair usually writes so per- ceptively on prison matters: I cannot under- stand the fog that has come between him and Zeno's Life (31 January). George Blake,...

I transferred Chateaubriand from Saint-Malo to Brest (7 February). My only ex- cuse is that I was busy with the career of Chateaubriand for reasons which have nothing to do with...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS My father, whose name I forget, was a fat, lazy man in a tweed pork-pie hat with a tobacco-stained moustache. Someone I once met somewhere told me that...

(Letters, 31 January), is a counsel we neglect at our peril. Ever so slightly pricked by the verb 'None of us are ...' in Sir Denis's quotation, I looked also at my Oxford...

Sir : Mr Nyman (17 January), whilst having endeared himself to us all with his taxidermic puns and lachrymatory wit, so obviously the result of earnest lucubration, really must...

Sir: In his review of our The Lost Theatres of London (13 December), George Rowell, to point his personal opinion, to which he is quite entitled, that the book is indigestible...

Trevor Grove reports: In Rosencrantz and Gui!- denstern Are Dead the eponymous heroes are shown in conversation with each other during the periods that they are off stage in...

PHILIDOR V. Bartolovic (Problem. 1951). White to play and mate in eight moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 425 (Mansfield): Q - B 5!, threat R - Q 4. 1 . Kt - K 2; 2 P...

COMPETITION Set by H. I. Freeman: Poems have on occa- sion been written consisting of a single letter, or even a dot. Competitors are invited to write a critical appreciation...

Across 1 'In large white flakes falling on the city brown — and perpetually settling and loosely lying' (Bridges) (10) 6 The old bird (4) 10 They are well known to the...