E ighty-one Labour councillors from Liverpool and Lambeth lost their appeal in the High Court against being surcharged over £200,000 and banned from office for five years,...

THE indignation over the appearance of a 12-year-old Iranian bride in Britain would have puzzled our ancestors. In the most famous love story in our language, the girl is only...

NEXT week the American Congress must decide whether to grant President Reagan the $ 10 0 million he wants for the Nicara- guan Contras. This is a very decision important , not...

'BUY BRITISH' HYPOCRISY F irst the British delegated compassion to the state. The private citizen was absolved . from the responsibility to help those in trouble: welfare was...

Is Norman Tebbit socialism's last hope? FERDINAND MOUNT W e commentators have our ups and downs. There are off-days when the glass is cloudy and the tea-leaves are a soggy...

JOHN MORTIMER I t's only a couple of years since I left the law, and the moment my back is turned there they go again, picking away at trial by jury. I would commend to Mr...

A few examples of the distressing English sentimentality about children AUBERON WAUGH I do not know how the Conservative Party manages to find them. No doubt people like Mr...

Change in the City has created a new attitude to money and a new jeunesse doree making and spending it very fast. By Nicholas Coleridge A COUPLE of months ago I was billeted...

Are Englishmen beginning to think begging creditable? On Saturday night the performance at Her Majesty's Theatre ended in a most extraordinary scene. The performers in the...

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the way American support of Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries has backfired Managua ON ONE side of the road were shreds of uniform and a...

Richard Bassett on the reason why Dr Waldheim suppressed the details of his war service Vienna LAST week, most Austrians and certainly all foreign correspondents in Vienna re-...

Richard West finds the Garden of England strangely transformed Folkestone THE proposed Channel tunnel will start, on the English side, by the village of Cheriton, inland from...

Insiders: a profile of Victor Sassie, presiding genius of the Gay Hussar ONCE they escape from the heat of the kitchen, most chefs seem to lead lives of utter banality. Not...

William Deedes retired as editor of the Daily Telegraph last Friday. He recalls his entry to journalism in 1931 WATCHING a slice of film about Rupert Murdoch's Wapping the...

The press: Paul Johnson asks what makes a newspaper intelligent SO MANY things are going on in the national press at the moment, there is so much change, novelty, anger,...

The rabbits in the box at No. 11 JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE A part from that, Mrs Lincoln, did You enjoy the play?' Arriving back in Fleet Street ten days ago after three weeks'...

THERE are people who make a dishonest living out of forming a limited liability company, obtaining credit, making full use of it, and, when things go wrong, walking away from...

Why Standard Chartered is a bank with a sense of porpoise CHRISTOPHER FILDES N othing is more unsettling in business than the feeling that you need to walk faster, because...

BUSINESS? Business is terrible. They're even sacking the sons-in-law. That service- able Hollywood maxim holds good for the City, too. When Wedd Durlacher, our biggest...

LEYLAND trucks now appear to have value only as a threat. 'Give us Land Rover', say General Motors, 'or we won t take your truck division.' What a decline from the days when...

Sir: When the mighty die, the press queues up to fawn; even journalists expire know- ing that they can count on damp-eyed tributes from other journalists. But when a...

Sir: It was interesting to read of the reactions of Peter Phillips CA class pre- judice', 11 January) to the National Gal- lery of Washington exhibition Treasure Houses of...

Sir: You have recorded many strange effects of the Fleet Street revolution. Since the Times transferred printing to Wapping at the end of January, as a postal subscri- ber I...

Sir: I know my old friend Taki well enough not to follow closely in his footsteps in most areas, but at least thought myself safe to ski behind him. Instead (High life, 8...

Sir: Alexander Chancellor (Television, 1 March) may be interested to know that a 'Wally' is a person who does know not what a 'Wally' is. Robert Gilbert 47 Woodstock Road,...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! Please enter a subscription to The Spectator I enclose my cheque for c (Equivalent SUS & Eurocheques accepted) RATES: 12 Months 6 Months UKJEire 0 £41.00 0...

Words, words, words Alan Watkins LOYALISTS AND LONERS by Michael Foot Collins, £15 A few years ago Mr Foot published Debts of Honour, a collection of essays on people who had...

Frances Partridge BLOOMSBURY/FREUD: THE LETTERS OF JAMES AND ALIX STRACHEY 1924-1925 edited by Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick Chatto &Windus, 174.95 tee T . here are some...

Brian Martin TALKING TO MYSELF: A MEMOIR OF MY TIMES by Studs Terkel Harrap, £9.95 T he Pulitzer prizeman, Studs Terkel, must possess a stack of record tapes the size of a...

Christopher Hawtree HOMAGE TO QWERT YUIOP by Anthony Burgess Century Hutchinson, £19.95 I . t is fitting that Anthony Burgess's pub- lishers should not have bothered to send...

Roy Kerridge PUCK OF THE DROMS: THE LIVES AND LITERATURE OF THE IRISH TINKERS by Artelia Court University of California Press, £21.25 N ot long ago, I saw a pack of wild...

Alan Bell LOVE IN A COOL CLIMATE: THE LETTERS OF MARK PATTISON AND META BRADLEY 1879-1884 edited by Vivian Green Clarendon Press, £12.95 T his is a curious tale, skilfully...

Peter Levi THE MIRROR OF MYTH by Jasper Griffin Faber, 15 W hen a scholar has written a long book that alters an important subject, such as Homer, he has a right to some...

It being Lent, my vows but one day old, I should have passed The Rutting Stag But from the public bar hysteria was unleashed. My entry was unnoticed, madness was abroad And my...

Grey Gowrie MARTHA'S VINEYARD AND OTHER PLACES by David Hockney Thames & Hudson, .f100 W ystan Auden used to play a rather campy game which divided writers into Alices and...

Fiction The News from Ireland and other stories by William Trevor, Bodley Head, £8.95 Memoirs of Many in One 'edited' by Patrick White, Cape, £8.95 Cod Streuth by Bamber...

Theatre Glengarry Glen Ross (Mermaid) Perfect pitch Christopher Edwards T his revival of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play gives the public another opportunity to...

Ran ('15', selected cinemas) An Oriental Lear Peter Ackroyd I t is clear from the start that this is going to be a very elaborate film — whether in the elaboration of...

The British race: a View of Portraiture 1625— 1850 (Colnaghi until 29 March) Conforming to type David Wakefield A ttitudes to portraiture and collecting portraits have...

Shiny little things Rodney Milnes I have acquired a new toy and nothing, save for the timely intervention of the editor, is going to stop me telling you about it. It is called...

Coming down in the world Ursula Buchan L ike displaced Russian noblemen driv- ing Parisian taxis to pay the rent after 1917, magnolias cannot quite hide their sense of innate...

Freaks and subversives Alexander Chancellor I have seen only the first and the last in Channel 4's My Britain series. The first had an American pop music impresario called...

Play it again Meryl Taki Gstaad In F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story BabY - Ion Revisited, the hero, Charlie Wales' returns to Paris, the city of his youth, afte r a long...

Fighting chances Jeffrey Bernard But on Tuesday night I saw two people go over the top in such splendid style. I watched Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns in both their fights on...

Cold comfort Alice Thomas Ellis I f you really wanted to baffle a Texan or a Japanese or even your mother-in-law, provided she didn't hail from the East End, you could speak...

Midwinter madness P. J. Kavanagh T his is no country for old men — too cold. The young in one another's arms (I hope). The trouble with being besotted by the seasons is that...

I n Competition No. 1411 you were asked to respond as an American Poet Laureate, dead or alive, named or unnamed, to a typically governmental request for verses O n an...

T he normal way of showing chess games to the public during a tournament is by means of manual demonstration on giant wall boards. During the Kasparov- Korchnoi and...

Apparently Sussex University has recently held a seminar on 'The Politics of Eating whatever that may be. You are invited to provide an imaginary extract from one of the papers...

" I N AI A E H A 0 I'S 1 Ari 11 11 a Li 39 ' 0 N - I v_1.12.t_L_C_!c_...4 T HADY.CHIARAc T The unclued lights are fielding pos i- tions at cricket. Winners: Mrs S. Jordan,...

749: Winner takes all by Doc A first prize of 120 and two further prizes of £10 (or a copy of Chambers Dictionary, price £12.95 — ring the words 'Chambers Dictionary'...

A THE English Reformation reduced the full Divine Office from eight hours to two, Mattins and Evensong. More recently a similar reformation of eating habits has occurred:...

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