M VYSHINSKY is sufficiently incalculable for some possibility of a last-minute agreement on minor points . at Paris to exist still. An agreement of any substantial importance...

The German resistance which greeted the beginning of the dis- mantling of various synthetic oil plants in the Ruhr this week was fortunately not pressed to the point of open...

Mr. Alexander has returned from Hongkong, where his short visit has served to remind both the colony and its neighbours that the British Government is not indifferent to our...

The people of Trieste might have been excused if they had made a mess of their municipal elections. For five years they have lived in an atmosphere of violence and uncertainty,...

The reasons which prompted the Soviet Government to ask for a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers and then send M. Vyshinsky to Paris to obstruct its proceedings are...

To reverse the foreign policy which is now being pursued by the United States it would be necessary for Congress to make a drastic cut in the programme of economic aid to...

Experts on the subject of food production are given to making such startling predictions, and to contradicting each other so violently, that the ordinary man does not know what...

The agreement, signed in Paris last March, which provided for the unity and independence of Viet Nam was formally brought into force (though it still awaits ratification by the...

The finance of the National Health Service is alarming. To say that is not to condemn the scheme or to suggest that now that it is in operation it can be to any material extent...

Israel's first Budget contains no evidence of how the infant State is going to make both ends meet, or (to use a phrase of which much was heard in this connection a couple of...

T HERE is a fairly widespread, if somewhat indeterminate, belief that the present labour disputes on the British railways cannot simply be taken at their face value. A local...

which can invent radar and a mechanical brain is completely incapable of solving the problem of tips. A year or two ago waiters and the like gave it to be understood that they...

Mr. Churchill that by the restoration to office of M. Titulesco, whom M. Tataresco had displaced, we should get Tit for Tat. London, I observe, is now getting Sos for Szusz, a...

The appeal for the preservation of Thackeray's House in Young Street, Kensington, is so unanswerable that merely to have made it should have secured its aim. There Thackeray...

are also readers of the Sunday Express. Those who are will be familiar with a weekly political column whose author styles himself Cross-Bencher. From the air of authority with...

I T was a great pity from some points of view that only one of the three speeches General Smuts made when he visited Cambridge last week ai Chancellor was reported—and that one...

sometimes difficult. When Dr. Evatt, for example, on arrival in Australia, says that the inter- national situation has improved greatly, largely because of a change in the...

By GEORGE BRINSMEAD D URING the war Colonel Peron (as he then was) was con- fident, as were most South American military officers, that the German Army would triumph. At the...

By OWEN TWEEDY I SRAEL asked for and has secured the attention of the world. But recently publicity for the problems of the one-year-old State of Israel has been reduced. Among...

By MARTIN COOPER A FT ER more than a fortnight of concerts in which all Elgar's main works have been given, in generally excellent conditions thanks to the Henry Wood Concert...

By STRATHEARN GORDON W HEN, after marked loyalty during the war, Ceylon rather unexpectedly reached full Dominion status in February, 1948, people said that of course there was...

By EDWARD MONTGOMERY New York, how loth M ISS REBECCA WEST should be in America these days. Between New York and Washington she would find a veritable three-ringed circus of...

By DEREK HUDSON A CITIZEN of "the Sunset Age," as Sir Osbert Sitwell calls it, may occasionally wish to take stock of his blessings. And one of the blessings—one of the credit...

ON TAKING SCHOOLS By DAVID SHEARS (St. Edmund Hall, Oxford) T HE only cheerful thing about my Schools was that I got them over quickly. Full Honours in Modern Greats entail...

Tan Aligemeine Zeitung lends authenticity to a remarkable document which had already appeared in a Swiss paper, the Evolution. It purports to be a manifesto of " The German...

By HAROLD NICOLSON I T has been agreeable, as a relief from the perplexities of this sundered world, to read the correspondence aroused by the new type of buffet cars to be...

THE THEATRE "Love in Albania." By Eric Linklater. (Lyric, Hammersmith.) How rare, nowadays, is style, and with what pleasure we salute it I No one could call Mr. Linklater's...

THE Covent Garden Opera season, which came to an end with a performance of Figaro on June nth, was chiefly remarkable fot the two cycles of The Ring and Tristan during the last...

"Key Largo." (Warner.)—" Christopher Columbus." (Odeon.)-- " Manhandled." (Plaza.) KEY LARGO is one of a chain of islands which string out from the tip of Florida. It is hot,...

THE idea of a successful dramatist who is, like David Normandy in this farcical comedy, to all intents and purposes a figment of his own imagination, and who sees his life and...

EDWARD BURRA'S new exhibition at the Leicester Galleries—his fifth —shows no startling developments, nor any noticeable weakening of his perverse and powerful talent. Projects...

BETWEEN the brown bill of a bird All a heart's passion I have heard Through the June night, singing and singing. World to destruction going, world Where life is dying under...

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Ordinary edition to any address in the World. 52 weeks El 10s. Od. 26 weeks 15s. Od. Air Mail to any Country in Europe. 52 weeks £2 7s. 6d. 26 weeks 3s. 9d....

Sta,—Mr. Jones's letter in the Spectator of June 10th ignores completely one essential difference between the l3fitish territories in East and West Africa—the . fact that the...

Snt,—I noticed in your editorial of May 20th on Far Eastern affairs that you predicted the strong possibility of an expansive foreign policy of the Chinese Communist Government,...

EXAMINATION FEES Sta,—As Janus has pointed out in the Spectator's Notebook for June 10th, the revised scale of fees to be charged for entry to the new examination is a matter...

Sra,—In the Spectator of May 27th you publish a letter by Miss Frida Stewart which I cannot leave unanswered. Being French and having worked with the Free French movements, I...

Sta.—Mr. Hodgkin's excellent review , of conditions among the Arab League Powers would surely have been of even greater value had he looked at the realities of the present day....

SIR,—The marked reversion to religious fervour and phraseology at the Blackpool Conference is worthy of some note. Religious zeal should unite us to God, but one looks in vain...

Sia,—Protests against the procedure in the case of Gerhard Eisler are, of course, merely* formal, since nothing could be more obvious than the relief of all parties concerned...

Sis,—On June 10th you kindly published my letter linking the first Jutes in Kent with the North Frisian coast of Schleswig-Holstein. May I now speculate, though with less...

SLR, —A reviewer of Sir Evelyn Wrench's Transatlantic London in the Spectator of May 6th quotes a pleasing story about " the first Aperican flag hoisted in old England." It is...

the field rose is growing by the side of a dog rose, both in flower, though the field rose is rather more floriferous and was in blossom earlier. It is, perhaps, surprising that...

Sta,—A good deal might be accomplished if some arrangement could be come to between the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the N.F.U. and the N.U.A.W. on the question of overtime. At...

to suggest a list of flowers favoured by the hive bee, but in no answering list have I ever seen mentioned a flower which fills my bees with peculiar greed, cotoneaster...

ripe strawberries a good fortnight before mine showed sign of reddening ; and mine will be less gargantuan. The reason is twofold: The one crop was very heavily watered' in its...

IT has long been said, and with truth, that the farmer despises the garden ; and his own garden has often been a most miserable affair. On the other hand, the farm labourer has...

How quick is the recovery from the destructive shocks of nature. Those species of bird that seemed to be almost wiped out by the severe frosts of two years ago—green woodpeckers...

Stalin : A Political Biography. By I. Deutscher. (Oxford University Press. 25s.) " THERE is reason to believe that, as an organiser and a man of action, Stalin is second only...

Friends of Keats FOR Englishmen the study of Keats is, today, oddly embarrassed. Most of the grand documents are in American possession. The British Museum holds on to the MS....

7 9 Benjamin Constant. By Harold Nicolson. (Constable. 18s.) BENJAMIN CONSTANT is immortal as the author of Adolphe. Adolphe is a unique masterpiece in that it describes...

Equality. By David Thomson. (Cambridge University Press. Current Problems Series. 3s. 6d.) IN the past the British have tended to be more agitated by the pursuit of liberty than...

A Ghost Town on the Yellowstone. By Elliot Paul. (The Cresset Press. 12s. 6d.) THE jacket of this book recommends it by stressing the fact that it is by the author of A Narrow...

The Ethics of Advertising. By F. P. Bishop. (Robert Hale. 10s. 6d.) MR. BISHOP, who was advertisement manager of The Times for many years, is extraordinarily interesting and on...

The Radio Play. By Felix Felton. - (Sylvan Press. 10s. 6d.) THE account of Felix Felton's career on the jacket of his book shows him to be an extremely versatile person. He...

Great Mischief. By Josephine Pinckney. (Chapman and Hall. 8s. 6d.) WHEN you put down Tess of the D'Urbervilles your feelings are not, in spite of the last sentence, directed...

An Essay on the Content of Education. By Eric James. (Harrap. 5s.) IN this short book of just over a hundred pages the High Master of Manchester Grammar School raises many of...

[A Book Token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender of the first coma solution of this week's crossword to be opened alter noon on Tuesday week, lane 28th. Envelopes must...

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(Chatto and Windus. 10s. 6d.) MR. HUGHES was brought to Egypt by the fortunes of war and the B.B.C., and has now written a book about that much described but little understood...

(Staples 7s. 6d.) IN this two-hundred-page view of the whole of English literature the bones are all there and in the right proportions - ; but the modelling of the flesh is...

By CUSTOS As had seemed inevitable, ordinary share prices have now broken through the post-war low point established in the convertibility crisis of September, 1947. To those...