):‘ e Chancellor of the Exchequer sits down s weekend to put the finishing touches to Budget against the backcloth of the big- t convulsion the international monetary tern has...

Through his courageous and impressively successful campaign in the New Hampshire presidential primary, Senator McCarthy has performed a priceless service to the United States....

The ice is breaking up. Presidents are under pressure—in America from Senator Eugene McCarthy, with a 41 per cent poll in the first of the presidential primary elections; in...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH By the time they read this, most readers will know the result of the South Kensington by- election, but it would be wrong for anyone to...

AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON New York—The report of the President's Advisory Commission on last summer's civil disorders managed to affront both Mr John- son and Mr Nixon with its...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS Twinkle, twinkle, Ringo Starr, How I wonder where you are? Back home from the Himalayas? Surely Beatles should be stayers— Sticking out their six-week...

CZECIIOSLOVAKIA TIBOR SZAMUELY After twelve years of political stagnation Eastern Europe is stirring again. This time the storm centre is in Prague. Twice in our century —in...

DIPLOMACY JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE The surprise announcement of the new British ambassadors in Washington, Paris and Bonn has undoubtedly come as a bitter pill to some of those...

RHODESIA ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME, MP The supreme prize which would be the reward of an honourable settlement of the Rhodesian dispute would be the firm establishment of a genuinely...

J. W. M. THOMPSON There's never been a major change in society yet which didn't produce unforeseen side- effects; it is one of the neglected truths of politics that you can...

THE PRESS GEORGE HUTCHINSON Though newspapers thrive on sensation, it's usually somebody else's sensation, not their own. Exceptions do occasionally occur, how- ever, when...

PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN Now that the dust has settled, let me begin by taking a brief look at the very nasty controversy which preceded the current tour of the West Indies....

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN New York—I was recently taken to the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center and was given occasion to reflect on the odd art of opera and my...

ROBERT BLAKE On the morrow of the 1945 general election the Conservatives faced a period of opposition comparable only with the years after 1906. But they behaved much more...

From 1830 to 1885 the Conservative party, whether in its Peelite guise or in its shape as refounded by Derby and Bentinck, was essentially a minority party. It held a majority...

ANTHONY BURGESS Cats only came properly into my life when, after six years of soldiering and two years of postwar mess (known officially as readjust- ment), I got a lecturing...

C. von FURER-HAIMENDORF Structural Anthropology Claude Levi-Strauss translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Allen Lane The Penguin Press 50s) The position...

Interference HENRY TUBE The Side of the Angels John Rowan Wilson (Collins 25s) SS San Pedro and Castaway James Gould Cozzens (Longmans 18s each) The Park Philippe Sollers...

JEAN FRANCO End of the Game and other stories Julio Cortazar translated by Paul Blackburn (Collins and Harvill 25s) `I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere,' runs a poem by Robert...

(was a very good year for frogs) WES MAGEE Tadpoles on a shelf Eye high Blue through their jar Beyond reach And window curving. Those button black Frock tailed swimmers...

ROBERT HUGHES After the publication of Imitations, and the ver- sions of odes by Horace and the tenth satire of Juvenal which appeared in Near the Ocean, Robert Lowell's...

MARTIN JARRETT-KERR The Church Hans Ming (Burns and Oates 84s) These two books might have been written ex- pressly to illustrate the clerihew: Can anyone mould the Vatican?...

THOMAS BRAUN Professor Gelzer's lucid biography of Caesar, epoch-making when first published in Germany in 1921, has improved further in successive editions. Peter Needham's...

RONALD HINGLEY Letters to Georgian Friends Boris Pasternak translated with an introduction and notes by David Magarshack (Seeker and Warburg 42s) This book sheds new light on...

Pastoral PR ROY STRONG As a finicky old portrait busybody my mind always sinks into my toecaps when I open a biography and see as frontispiece an uncap- tioned engraved...

BARRY HUMPHRIES The Italian Ann Radcliffe edited with an intro- duction by Frederick Garber (oup 35s) ISABELLA THORPE: 'When you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian...

DAVID WILLIAMS The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough edited by A. L. P. Norrington (ouP 21s) In this country we've never been much enamoured of Pantheons and Academies in the French...

(Allen and Unwin 42s) Trouble and strife RICHARD RATHBONE Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo Georges Balandier (Allen and Unwin 42s) The history of the kingdom of the...

RICHARD ORMOND Luke Fildes, RA: A Victorian Painter L. V. Fildes (Michael Joseph 42s) This biography of Luke Fildes is a classic book of its kind, and should have been written...

DAVID KNOWLES A History of Medieval Ireland A. J. Otway- Ruthven (Ernest Benn 70s) Historians are often enough the slaves of their own formulas. Ireland, alone of the main...

STUART HOOD In the Bac Handbook for 1968 there is an analysis of programmes from which it emerges that, in the previous year, a tenth of the com- bined output of BBC I and BBC...

Hard on the bard PENELOPE HOUSTON Romeo and Juliet (Odeon, Leicester Square, 'A') Eye of the Devil (Ritz; 'X') `This Romeo and Juliet is no ordinary love story,' says the...

MUSIC & RECORDS EDWARD BOYLE Ever since my boyhood I have admired Georg Szell as a conductor, and it was splendid to hear him and the London Symphony Orchestra in such...

BALLET CLEMENT CRISP Six new ballets in one week sounds almost too good to be true, and on last week's show- ing, alas, it is. Both Western Theatre Ballet and Ballet Rambert...

BUSINESS VIEWPOINT MALCOLM DAVIDSON Malcolm Davidson ; Owns and runs Helmet Vaults, the City of LOndon's first antique shop. The objective observer of the City scene cannot...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT The only part of the Stock Exchange which is happily looking forward to a terrible budget is the gilt-edged market. As one firm of brokers tersely put it, if...

CHRISTOPHER FILDES `BACK THE POUND TO WIN,' the new slogan for selling Premium Bonds, gains in frankness what it loses in dignity: perhaps all that was wrong with those wicked...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL This week I open a new portfolio. Unlike my . first, begun last October, which has as its aim as much growth as the maintenance of an average income of 4...

CUSTOS The money markets, domestic and international, and the flight into gold have continued to dom- inate the scene. Gold had been bought on an unprecedented scale in front...

Across 1 Disarrays the frills (7) 5 A gem of indecision? (7) 9 Made an aside in the library? (7) 10 She consorts with the Preserver (7) 11 Fruit of the ancestral tree (5-5) 12...

the British Citizens (Kenya) Exclusion Act (as it has so aptly been called) are alarming enough. Giving cause for even greater concern is their abdication of their his- torical...

the new immigration law was thoroughly well merited (1 March). May I point to some lessons and offer a warning? The mismanagement of the economy and over-ambitious welfare...

Cranley Onslow (Letters, I March), but as an active Conservative worker, I find his statement, `If British aid had been made conditional on the Kenya government's pursuing...

the world in my attempts to speak up for Afri- cans' rights, but those of us who have travelled extensively in Africa and India must think that it is extremely far-fetched for...

the grounds that, as the possessor of a British passport, he failed in allegiance to the King. We ought not to expect to have things both ways. No government, or for that matter...

LETTERS Sir: Uganda's Minister of Defence said last week: 'I think it is morally wrong for Britain to close the door to its citizens. . . . She cannot be blind to her...

to be endured by the Kenyan Asians and other foreign intruders already on these islands are as nothing compared to the sneers, stony silences and hard-voiced contempt which I,...

(8 March). English native opinion has had little chance to make itself properly heard on this subject. A trickle of alien immigration began in 1956- 57, broadening rapidly into...

Sir: Amid all the sanctimonious humbug and hairsplitting about legality and illegality, those who now vilify Mr Smith might pause to re- member that it is his practical duty to...

Sir: Mr John Ashe (Letters, 8 March) is almost incoherent with rage at the 'obscurantist fer- vour' with which I persist in defending Gerald Brooke : a man who for the past...

Sir: I have no doubt that the members of the International Olympic Committee believe that they had achieved a major concession when South Africa pledged its sport organisations...

From the 'Spectator, 14 March 1868—The public in this country seems still unable to understand the impeachment of President Johnson. The event has startled it into a closer...

licence we give our legislators in the euphe- mistic name of 'the sovereignty of Parliament' was once npon a time exercised subject to cer- tain restraints—certain principles,...

Sir: That General Smuts, when formulating his draft preamble for the United Nations Charter, had before him the documentary product of Dumbarton Oaks, Sir Robert Bir- ley...

Sir: Mr Anthony Lewis (8 March) would have us scrap our traditional embodiment of the con- stitution in an elected and responsible legisla- ture and replace it with the...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS Major Somerset Courtenay-Smythe (née Serge Dzhugashvili Schickelgruber-Smythe), the keen Labour party supporter and distinguished col- lector of...

No. 492: Octet Competitors are invited to compose an eight- line poem or stanza of a poem on any one of the subjects given below, using four of the following pairs of words as...

PHILIDOR Black White 4 men 3 men Dr W. Speckmann (1st Prize, Deutsche Schoch- zeitung, 1961). White to play and mate in three moves; solution next week. Solutign to no. 377...