I N 1946 the Government introduced its Defence Estimates with three explanatory comments : that a fundamental change had to be made in policy because of the invention of the...

No. 6608 FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1955 PRICE 7d.

PINEAU WITHOUT THE PRINCE Through the Socialist leader, M. Christian Pineau has agreed to try to form a new French Government, it remains to be seen whether he will be able to...

T HE proposal that capital punishment should be sus- pended for five years was duly defeated by 245 votes to 214. The Manchester Guardian seems to think that those who voted...

Kremlin should not distract attention from the hard facts embodied in the new Soviet 'defence' budget. These facts are very hard indeed. The crucial point is that Soviet...

the Paris Treaties is not based on any hope of success in the Bundestag. Few of them believe that the merging Of West Germany into NATO can be prevented; but they are anxious to...

In most newspapers on Wednesday morning the two uses of nuclear power were strikingly contrasted in adjacent columns. On the one hand there was the White Paper setting out the...

on drunken drivers, either. If he is right, then surely the logi- cal deduction is that it is a waste of time increasing the length of prison sentences that such offenders can...

THE SIGNIFICANT FACT about Mr. Bevan's motion calling for immediate high-level talks with the Soviet Union is not that he has succeeded in winning for it the support of more...

Manchester merchants bought nearly nine times more grey cloth last year from India than in 1953. And deliveries are still increasing. This, together with larger imports of cloth...

Lord Douglas of Kirtleside and Mr. Peter. Masefield ought to be feeling thoroughly ashamed of themselves at the final out- come of the Peters affair—if it really is the final...

the Licensed Grocers' and Vintners' Association saw the Minister for Justice in Dublin last week and put forward certain de- mands. These included the abolition of (I quote from...

concerned the quarrel between the BBC and the British Transport Com- mission over the television programme in the Special Inquiry series which was to have dealt with the...

MISS EL UNE 311A ION'S television programme on behalf of the Labour Party last week was very well received by the press and no doubt it was a good programme. Miss Burton...

something very odd about the case of Colonel Scotland. Last July the colonel's agents submitted to the War Office for clearance before publi- cation the MS of a book called The...

By MICHAEL STUART M OSCOW correspondents have reported that they and the Western diplomats gasped with astonishment at the announcement of Malenkov's resignation, but that the...

undertaking which has secured considerable publicity. The portrait was commissioned by the Company of Fishmongers, who agreed to pay the artist £2,000. The Queen has given...

has put out a list attractions to lure us to San Remo, Alassio, Bordighera, a proudly heralded as 'The Defiling of the Ancient Carriages, other resorts on the 'Riviera of...

visiting England for two days, paid the Spectator a com- pliment at her press conference on Wednesday. Asked how she kept in touch with British affairs, she said that she...

February 20, 1830 COLONEL. DAVIES proceeded to observe, that the condition of the country by no means warranted such high Army Estimates. The French army, which was nearly...

By DAVID ORMSBY GORE, MP HE recent publicity given to the operation of price- fixing and resale price maintenance schemes may well have given the impression that it is the motor...

R Y JOYCE CARY T HERE has been in England this year an outcry against the horror comics and demand for censorship. It had the air of spontaneity, but it began in a newspaper...

By TOPHER DRIVER (Christ Church, Oxford) A FORTNIGHT ago there appeared an article by Anthony Howard on 'Undergraduate Christianity.' The gist of it was that Christianity in the...

By COMPTON MACKENZIE G IRLS took no interest in birds or bird's-nesting in the days of my youth: today bird-watching is a fashion- able feminine pastime. Girls took no interest...

shut down. Those delightful glassy carriages with their well-worn wooden seats and their smell of shag tobacco will no longer rattle over the girders from Seaforth to Dingle. No...

SIR,—The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, after holding sixty-three meetings and hearing 118 Witnesses, most of whom were doctors or judges and other lawyers, recom- mend...

have been the last to hold the high office of Home Secre- tary, under the caption of a scurrilous article entitled 'Judicial Barbarism,' are a•disgrace to British journalism....

peatedly stated that in my Christmas broadcast I said that five thermo-nuclear bombs would knock Britain out of a war. There is no such statement in that broadcast.—Yours...

interested to read you agreed that Mrs. Thompson was wrongly hanged. But, in this case, would you say that the abolition of the death penalty would have in any way helped...

against capital pun- ishment, the points that have been ignored by both 'Drips' and 'Drops' seem far more important than all the fervid advocacy that this vexed question has...

Could Britain. Fight? Professor Norman Gibbs Lord Russell Judicial Barbarism Gerald Gardiner,Q.C,. Lt.-Col. E. H. Cobb, Mrs. Carol Whitehead A. R. Clough, J. M. Sinclair Road...

Euston 3221

the cast, Sir Compton Mackenzie did not mean his gibe at Herodotus ('Sidtlight,' February 11) to be taken too seriously, I feel that a paper of the standing of the Spectator...

would exceed the limit of space allotted to letters, so I will only state: Mr. Middleton is convinced, and would have his readers take as settled, the following stark points :...

Mr. John Gordon. I'm also glad that he floored him. But it's unfair to hit a man when he's down.—Yours faithfully, XAN FIELDING Cowrie, Plaidy, Looe, Cornwall

Sta,—Your article is just another sentimental attempt to put over the criminal as hero. When the death sentence was last suspended, the public was revolted by a number of mur-...

'The toll system has some obvious disadvantages, but they are far outwcighcd by the benefits, as any motorist who has travelled in Italy or in the United States will testify.'...

no protest about a description of Kitchener in your correspondence columns as, among other things, a so-called general. I thought everyone who had ever served in what was once...

he does record (Book 8, Chapter 94) that the Athenians told a story of the Corinthians keeping out of the Battle of Salamis until it was won, adds that the Corinthians did not...

arising from the last-minute cuts which it was necessary to make in my article on the Priest-Workers in France in the Spectator of January 28? Theie are, to the best of my...

new sense of authority, Perhaps that is an odd word to use in connection with an artist who can he so unashamedly whimsy, who cultivates so assiduously an easy, almost casual,...

TELEVISION AND RADIO SINCE I began looking at it I have had a notion that splendid television can result from artlessness—artlessness in the actors, of course. not in the...

The Ghost Writers. By Ted Allan. (Arts.) talents are being wasted, but also that he s expected to put his name to scripts written by someone else who has been '61ack-listed' for...

bribe (unless, of course, a bribe is considered a mere formality in those parts, like shaking hands). From time to time drama slithers un- comfortably into melodrama; and it...

Desiree. (Carlton.)—A Prize of Cold. (Odeon.) IT Is the prerogative of Hollywood to monkey about with history, and there is no plausible reason why an historical novel spun...

ON Monday last in the Royal Festival Hall I saw many old gramophile friends, some of whom I had not seen since the early days of the war. They had all come to hear in the flesh....

By KATHLEEN NOTT I N Speculations T. E. Hulme demanded a Critique of Satisfactions which could be applied to philosophies. This would certainly be useful provided that we...

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes: Volume 1, The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936; Volume II, l'he Inside Struggle, 1936-1939. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 31s. 6d. each.) IT was a...

BY Mr. Izzard's own admission, his title is misleading; it should have been The Journalist on the Job.' He was no more on Everest than the walker at Pen y Pass is on Snowdon....

The Old Cause. By Donald Carswell. (Cresset Press, 30s.) 'wino ! ', the very word was like a bell! At its sound historians ruched from their own lush pastures of scholarship to...

it was widely agreed that the nineteenth century was the era of that 'art-form' and that the century had ended not in 1900 but with the outbreak of the First World War. Amidst...

IT is often asked, rather querulously, why historians today seem unable to write with the superb gusty confidence of Macaulay. One reason is that there has occurred a...

The Wicked Pavilion. By Dawn Powell. (W. H. Allen, 12s. 6d.) Sowers of the Wind is a straightforward and rumbustious Australian effort about the military occupation of Japan...

Mother and Son. By I. Compton-Burnett. (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.) WITH a reference to the later Eliot, Mr. Liddell writes two of Miss Compton-Burnett's dialogues out as verse; he...

REPRINTS during the last couple of months include books of appeal and of importance. As a personal choice I should put, as an easy winner amongst books of appeal, Lark Rise to...

Selections from 'Les Amours Jaunes' of Tristan Corbiere. Translated into English verse by C. F. Maclntyre. (C.U.P., 28s.) CORBIERE is no gift to a translator. For what is...

Loshak. (Charles Black, 50s.) IN recent years there have appeared one or two first-class monographs on British artists of the eighteenth century, which include short texts and...

another memory Mr. Vevers's illustrated volume is recommended to all who - love to wander along the coasts peering at seaweed, anemones, limpets and jellyfish. Next summer,...

the Manchester Guardian, 1953- 1954. (Collins, 12s. 6d.) IT Is a very good thing that there should be an annual opportunity to preserve from too early oblivion so many...

nationalism in the British Empire; before getting into his subject he had thought it neces- sary to begin with a study of nationalism in Great Britain itself, and this book, on...

Broke, Lieut.-Colonel W. E. Lyon, etc. (Seeley Service, 25s.) THIS volume, the latest in the Lonsdale Library series, unleashes a series of experts upon their particular aspects...

H. D. Chaplin. . (Michael Joseph, 25s.) ONE of the regular battalions of The Queen's Own played an important part in the Palestine disturbances of 1938-39—an instance of that...

in 1932 with an injury to his brain which so damaged his power of movement that, till he was eighteen, he could not even sit norm- ally, nor use his hands nor articulate words....

preface by Sir Herbert Read. (Methuen, 30s.) WHEN the first edition of Chinese Calligraphy appeared, Sic Herbert Read tells us, he was Immediately struck by its significance...

the development of prose fiction from the Arthurian legends to the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre. These fifteenth-century stories, as she says, are cast 'in a rigid and...

By CUSTOS Tim implications of the new dearer money policy, about which my colleague was warn- ning investors last week, seemed to have been at last appreciated by the stock...

to keep their heads. The nation is booming, a Budget surplus of several hundred millions is piling up and the Chancellor keeps issuing un- pleasant warnings about inflation. He...

26 This hydrocarbon isn't quite what Wilkie Collins wrote (6). 2 7 Girls with nothing in them (8). The rodent's evidently been sun- bathing (6). Dice in bottles; don't shake)...

function of present-day newspapers-e.g., a ballad on the Queen's speech at Tilbury (when the Armada was on its way) was written and printed in London on the following day. The...

iv Winners of Spectator Crossword No. 820: Ma. P. A. DRILLERS, 5k Tennyson Road. Harpenden, Herts. and SIR ARCHIBALD GORDON, Find. House, Cerrards Cross, Bucks.

Tale in the Belloc manner deal- ing with the sad fate of the boy who was excessively addicted to American horror comics. Not more than 20 lines, including (if thought necessary)...