Sir Geoffrey Howe is a modest man. It would be unkind to say, as Churchill supposedly said of Attlee, that he has a good deal to be modest about. His Budget does not at first...

Ferdinand Mount A man who has been humiliated by the voters three times in three months has every right to feel depressed. After being snubbed by the Scots and the Welsh, slung...

Many thanks to the two dozen readers wh'o wrote to answer my query as to the origin of an Irish legal joke. Four of them put me on to Serjeant Sullivan's The Last Serf cant in...

Auberon Waugh Common prudence inhibits me from commenting on the last stages of Mr Thorpe's vigorous denial of the charges against him. It was on the evening of Black Thursday,...

Neal Ascherson Cracow Hanging dexterously to the cornice, so that he doesn't pitch out of the window, the Pope talks to the crowds singing and chanting in the night below....

Hugh Thomas The European elections turned out to be national elections with a European face. In each nation, the voters treated the European poll as if it were a test of the...

Sam White Paris Only the Communists can derive unmitigated satisfaction from last Sunday's Euro-vote in France. As for the rest, they can share in varying degrees the...

Christopher Booker Quiz question: what world-shaking event was celebrated six and a half years ago with the aid of a concert given in York Minster by the Great Universal Stores...

Britain needs every penny of industrial investment it can get. Everyone says so. But why? k Because it makes us more competitive ' 4 ' r eplacing ageing plant? Because it...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington After the Wagnerian end to the political careers of Johnson and Nixon, Jimmy Carter is going down in the fashion of Willie Loman, the pedestrian...

Peter Ackroyd Los Angeles The screen-writer, one of 'the fifteen best in 1-1 °IlYwood', was getting nervous. We were l unching in La Dome, a Hollywood restaurant apparently...

In two articles last year Mr Christopher Booker accused Mr Reuben Ainsztein of the Sunday Times of deliberately distorting the evidence about the repatriation by Britain of...

Mr Chamberlain nearly carried on Wednesday a very important Bill. He believes that the working voters often cannot vote till evening without losing a day's wages, and proposed...

Tim Congdon 'Finance must determine expenditure; expenditure must not determine finance.' The remark was one of the keynotes of Sir Geoffrey Howe's first Budget speech. As a...

Sir: I have been an avid reader of anything written by Christopher Booker for a number of years, but I was saddened by the cynical and snide comments he made about the...

Sir: With the price of oil rising and its serious consequences about to fall upon us all, may , T I point out that it is essential that Wherever cheapness in anything can be...

Sir: Miss Pat Gilmour's somewhat brash recital, in her article 'Money for art's sake' In your issue of 9 June, of the numerous d ifficulties and contradictions in arts policy...

Sir: I couldn't agree more with your views about tourists and London (Notebook, 19 May). But how do you distinguish the really interested from the junketers who treat the city...

Sir: Tim Garton Ash suggests, in your 2 June edition, that the origins of the Conservative Party and the CDU must preclude any possibility of their forming closer ties. Is this...

Sir: It was inevitable, I suppose, that the week that my erstwhile drinking and marching partner, Jeffrey Bernard, finally tipped the winner of the Derby my newsagent would fail...

Sir: At the risk of provoking your editorial prerogative of declaring this correspondence closed, may I reply briefly to the irrepressible Mrs Silkin (Letters, 2 June)? If...

Hugh Lloyd-Jones Classical Attitudes to Modern Issues L.P. Wilkinson (Kimber £4.95) Mr Wilkinson is known as the author of attractively written hooks about Augustan poetry and...

John Grigg From Brass Hat to Bowler Hat Francis de Guingand (Hamish Hamilton £5.95) When General (as he then was) Montgomery took over command of the Eighth Army in August...

Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd Napoleon's 'Little Pest' Peter Gunn (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) 'It is impossible to imagine anything prettier, more alive, more amiable, more striking...

Muriel Spark Where do we go from here? We left our country, Bore gifts, Followed a star. We were questioned. We answered. We reached our objective. We enjoyed the trip....

Benny Green Oscar Wilde, Interviews and Recollec tions Vole I and II Ed. E.H. Mikhail (Mac" millan £12 each) Very often the simplest ideas are best. So much has been written...

Eriirna Fisher Poems and Journeys Charles Johnston (Bodley Head £3.90) Three Russian Poets Elaine Feinstein (Carcanet £2.80 paper) Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Fool Yevgeny...

Paul Able man The Book of Sand Jorge Luis Borges (Allen Lane £5.95) Borges writes about metaphor, arguably the central mystery of literature and life. This is not the same as...

Peter Jenkins Happy Days (Royal Court) Dispatches (Cottesloe) The Innocent (RSC, Warehouse) Beckett himself directs this revival of Happy Days and we were waiting for him to...

Rodney Milnes II ritorno (Glyndebourne) La Travlata (WNO, Oxford) I don't know whether part of this year's Glyndebourne experience is a course of master-classes by Elisabeth...

John McEwen Being the height of the summer season this is a bumper time for gallery exhibitions, but pride of place must go to House, whi ch celebrates its three years of...

Ted Whitehead The Buddy Holly Story (Classic Haymarket) The Music Machine (Rialto) The Buddy Holly Story (A) has all the elements of the classic rock myth — the young hero, the...

Richard Ingrams Having attended two different court cases in recent days my mind has been not unnaturally drawn to the themes of Crime and Punishment. The first was Regina v....

Marika Hanbury Tenison For many gardeners mint and horseradish tend to be considered as weeds rather than essential plants to grow in the herb garden. A new and, on the whole,...

Talc! New York Madison Square Garden is to boxing what Wembley is to football. There have been four halls there, each one more splendiferous than the one before it. This year...

Jeffrey Bernard Here we are in the middle of flaming June, w ith me accompanied around the house on MY promenades by a positive chain reaction of an explosion of herbaceous...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Here is a strange tale from Oxford, the story of the Courtrai chest: as Holmes would have said, one of those simple cases which are so extremely difficult....

David Levy One would hardly think it credible that chess players could or would form themselves into a trade union but that is exactly what happened in the US a little over a...