Last week in Bremen European heads of government committed themselves to a programme which will carry the Community a decisive step towards economic and monetary union. They did...

Not yet in from the cold Ferdinand Mount Last Sunday Mrs. Barbara Cartland was 77, according to the Daily Telegraph, or 74, if you believe the Sunday Times. Mr David Hockney...

Mrs Thatcher has asked T. E. (Peter) Utley to write speeches for her between now and the general election. This is an inspired a PPointment, and I am delighted to hear that the...

Man for all observances Auberon Waugh Like Dr Paisley, I was profoundly shocked that Cardinal Hume should choose the crypt chapel of the House of Commons to conduct his new...

Victoria Schofield Rawalpindi Already the building has an air of tragedy about it. Once it was East Pakistan House, where the Bengalis came to plead their case before their...

William Shawcross Washington When Richard Nixon asked Pat Ryan to marry him she refused. He hung around, driving her to her dates, waiting outside to take her home again....

David Levy In a recent interview, Andrei Amalrik, a Russian dissident-in-exile who has in his time endured as much as that which Alexander Ginsburg and Anatoly Shcharansky are...

Desmond Stewart Beirut An independent Christian state in Lebanon is, for at least three reasons,a lunatic notion: which will not, of course, prevent fanatics from trying to...

Sam White Paris What will France do about Spain's application to join the Common Market? In De Gaulle's or Pompidou's days there would have been no doubt as to the answer:...

Richard West Johannesburg During the winter months in Johannesburg when the temperature falls at night to freezirlg point and below, and even the days can be bitterly cold, it...

Christopher Booker After soaring into the Western heavens in the late Sixties and early Seventies like a skyrocket, as the most glamorous 'dissident' of them all, there is no...

Geoffrey Robinson No title could be more misleading than that Chosen by Jock Bruce-Gardyne for this Pamphlet, Meriden: Odyssey of a Lame buck published by the Centre for Policy...

Mary Morgan There is, after all, a spectre haunting Europe. Not, as Marx hoped in his Manifesto, the spectre of Communism, which as we know haunts Eastern Europe. In the West...

John Graham Wading through an official publication of well over 500 pages is not normally my idea of a large evening, but this week's report from the Royal Commission on...

The secret was revealed on Monday, and is a big one. Or that day the Government announced in both Houses that on the 4th June they had signed a Treaty with the Sultan by which...

Simon Raven Look first upon this picture: a long and ample table of green baize, on which are deployed three ranks of twelve squares, numbered from 1 to 36, and an extra file,...

Looking back and forward Nicholas Davenport The Editor has been making timely allusions to the amazing fact that this month the SPectator is one hundred and fifty years old....

Sir: Thank you to Cohn Brewer (8 July) for his revealing and forthright article 'The pride and prejudice of the social worker'. Magistrates have for so long been castigated as...

Sir: I am completing a book about Dunkirk and would like very much to get in touch with anyone who participated in those stirring days. If any of your readers can help, I would...

Sir: As a newspaper editor and book publisher for over fifty years and therefore by definition a practitioner in the arts of linguistical language and philology, I feel the time...

Sir: Mr Waugh's article 'The dubbin factor' (8 July) seems to suggest that Mrs Thatcher has not enough experience of criticism/m sults/physical assault to be an effective...

Sir: I am writing a critical biography of Countess von Arnim, Lady Russell, better knovi as 'Elizabeth' of Elizabeth and her German Garden. I would be extremely grateful for any...

An end and a beginning J Enoch Powell The Great Mutiny: India 1857 Christopher Hibbert (Allen Lane £7.95) When Captain (later General) Sleeman, the extirpator of Thuggee, had...

Ferdinand Mount Memoirs Reginald Maudling (Sidgwick & Jackson £7.95) On 12 November 1943, the Spectator published an article by Reginald Maudling, then aged twenty-six and a...

William Fishman Jewish Socialist Movements 1871 1917 Nora Levin (Routledge £9) It is salutary to be reminded, during this time of renewed persecution of Jews within Russia,...

Richard Cobb The Merthyr Rising Gwyn A. Williams (Groom Helm £7.95) This wonderfully vivid, compassionate, and intensely local book is a reminder, long overdue in this country,...

Benny Green Sullivan and his Satellites Alan Hyman (Chappell-Elm Tree Oooks £7.50). It may come as a surprise to some people to learn that Sir Arthur Sullivan had any...

Francis King Fire on the Mountain Anita Desai (Heinemann £3.50) Most English readers will probably assume that Kasauli, the summer-resort in the Simla hills that provides the...

Drastic surgery Rodney Milnes Cosi fan tune (Glyndebourne) Norma (Covent Garden) First things first: for all the fascination of Peter Hall's new production of Cost fan tutte,...

Theatre Unconvincing Peter Jenkins A Family (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) Disaster (ICA) How curious to be in a theatre where the curtain goes up and down with a swish and where...

Jail bird Ted Whitehead Straight Time (Warner West End 4) All he ever wanted was a decent job, a decent house and a bit of love and security, so how come he's serving a life...

Bone idle John McEwen It can have escaped no-one's attention that this is the year of Henry Moore's eightieth birthday. His sculptures glimmer through the trees of Kensington...

Jogger Richard Ingrams One of the most fascinating things about television is how quickly one forgets what one has seen. I leave it to the McLuhans w explain why this should...

Ever upward Talc' Social mountaineers, once treated with cont empt by their peers, are now becoming a dominant force in international society. And riding on the coat-tails of...

Lucky stars Jeffrey Bernard The horoscope for Geminis, in last Monday's Daily Mirror, told us that, 'Some of you will be in a creative frame of mind and taking up art, or...