T HE Ministry of Labour's attempts to bridge the gap between the British Motor Corporation and the unions which have called a strike that may involve about fifty thousand men...

T HE Prime Minister's statement on Cyprus has done nothing to solve the problem. Lord Radcliffe has arrived in the island to study the situation before drawing up a...

T HE Prime Minister complained in his speech at Padiham last week that the course which the Government is follow- ing is not always fully understood by the public and the press....

T HE Egyptian trade mission which is now visiting Britain is the outward sign of a new attempt to restore good relations between the two countries. Since the signing, in the...

They've just put down the ninety-seventh toast, And no one knows who's bottom or who's top, Who lies with whom, who's guest or who is host, And those who came to cough remained...

of using his position to deposit funds in a bank with which he is connected, and it seems that this is the issue on which he is complaining of interference. However, the circum-...

their journey, but even so they held up the traffic as far north as the Mount Pleasant sorting office. —Manchester Guardian, 'London Letter,' July 18. LONDON TRAFFIC waits...

BY RICHARD H. ROVERE New York T HE suspense. which was not very great in the first place, was broken last week, and Mr. Eisenhower will be an enthusiastic candidate to succeed...

BY CHARLES CURRAN M R. GAITSKELL's new pamphlet on nationalisation* is like Christmas Eve in Manchester. It is thick with fog. A good deal of the fog strikes me as artificial;...

from 'sex bomb' into 'intellectual'? Does Mrs., Miller still have serious thoughts about The Brothers Kara- mazov? Meanwhile Mrs. Miller came in not quite but very nearly...

ANOTHER STONE HAS been turned over at the Old Bailey and once again the public has had a glimpse of the grey gangsterdom that creeps and crawls beneath the surface of the West...

I AM WILLING TO WITHDRAW From the way the reproduction was set out it looked as if the main headline was missing, and something stirred in my memory. Didn't that issue of the...

week about The Investigator, the radio play about McCarthyism which made such a stir when it was broadcast in Canada and then privately circulated on tape in the United States....

MR. HAROLD WATKINSON, the Minister of Transport, last night praised the Daily Express for drawing attention to .Communists in trades unions.—Daily Express. July 14.

BY LORD ALTRINCHAM IL, ORD SALISBURY is a shrewd politician. Within his chosen limits he has excelled. In the House of Lords he has established a complete mastery. The Labour...

BY DESMOND FENNELL A COMMON way of misunderstanding the Spanish political situation is to suppose that it consists of Franco governing through a monolithic Fascist party—the...

BY PRINCE CHULA M OST Western visitors to my country—Thailand (or still Siam to some)—spend a few hours at the airport or a few days in Bangkok. In most cases they sleep,...

By BRIAN INGLIS H UGH LANE* was 'an Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian and (of course) Scotch inva- sions': and he loved his country much as Shaw did : With the same...

BY JOHN BETJEMAN 0 NE of the many good things about the Church of England is that we are allowed to criticise our bishops and archbishops in the public prints. Mr. Ivor Bulmer-...

T HE envelope bulged but was not at all heavy. What could it be that the British Broadcasting Corporation was sending me? White feathers? A rosette? A lock of Mr. Godfrey Winn's...

Wellesley died last week, was exactly suited to her poetry. It was at the end of a long, winding woodland drive, a brick Queen Anne house in a misty hollow, surrounded by one of...

Euston 3221

Turkey and Cyprus Mehmet All Panzer The Long Bow Slavomir Rawicz The PEN Congress Cecil Roberts The Casement Papers Rene MacColl A Poet of the Counter-Reformation John Little...

Bow' by Strix in the issue of the Spectator of July 13, I emphatically state that all I have said in my book The Long Walk is true, and I do not re- tract one word of it. I have...

SIR,—The account of the PEN Congress in the Spectator by Jenny Nasmyth is so much a con- coction of error and malice that it should not go unanswered. The writer must be...

Sir—Mr. Evelyn Waugh's attempted contrast between the Roman Catholic Church which has preserved its faith unchanged since the six- teenth century and the Church of England...

I regard as absolutely trust- worthy, that the Home Office is no longer in possession of Roger Casement's 'black' diaries and ledgers. It is not possible for me to reveal at...

O'Hara's letter of personal attack is due to my having been in a remote Druze village where no one reads the Spectator. I hope you will allow me to correct some of his...

Sul,—Cecil Beaton, in his letter (Spectator, June 22), agrees with your theatre critic that American stage design is superior to ours, and gives a few facts. Surely an...

of The Craft of Letters in England in the Spectator of July 13 makes an extraordinary statement in connection with the poet and radio. He com- ments that `to write with the...

Good and Bad BEFORE I acquired a set of my own I was not attracted by television; indeed, I was repelled by it. I remember spending a wet Saturday night in an Essex cottage...

in the sheer vocal quality of the singing in the Italian season at Covent Garden. It was not a great season, though the directors did their best by engaging Tagliavini and...

Now that works by the great artists of the Impressionist and immediately post-Impres- sionist generation fetch millionaire prices—a little Renoir landscape cost £6,000 in the...

Asw verdict on the future of the Lane pictures (discussed by Brian Inglis on another page) should not be influenced by their artistic value or by their importance to English or...

STREET-WALKER The girl who was sure she'd been murdered for love (or as near as damn it) walked the black-laquered street. She wished for closer identity with her feet, but...

Sexophonic, brazen Cretan screams the Muse, by drumsticks beaten. Nymph and satyr, corybantic here make hay—and their hay's antic. Spastic marionette, her shape is formal;...

Fleeing from Mrs. McGonigle, Mr. Smith Took refuge in a public telephone booth, Whence he rang, as he always did, forthwith, The Gospel Tabernacle, home of Truth. Mrs....

AND THE BATTLESHIP. (Warner.)-0H, LA- LA, CHERI. (Berkeley.)-AWAY ALL BOATS. (GaUMOIII.)---ANYTHING GOES. (Plaza.) BEING nosy, I like films about other people's domestic...

BY ANTHONY HARTLEY I T never rains but it pours. There had not been a new anthology of modern poetry for a year or two, and now, it seems, we are in for a spate of them. The...

(Hodder and Stoughton, 18s.) In a novelist or a biographer has fallen on hard times he is hereby tipped off to get himself signed up for one of the regional guides or...

(Longmans, 21s.) THERE is usually a row going on between the Augustans in at least one department of the Natural History Museum in London and the tough, publish-and-be-damned...

COOTE BAHADUR. By E. W. Sheppard. (Werner Laurie, 25s.) AN acute attack of ettr; is likely to be the curious result of reading the lives of these two eighteenth-century...

PARIS ALBUM 1900-1914. By Jean Cocteau. (W. H. Allen, 16s.) WHEN he was a child Jean Cocteau hated to get useful presents. The magic of Christmas was ruined for him by a...

are outer flanges of it, such as George's Square, which are outside the New Town proper; but which are under threat of destruction from (of all quarters) the University. Mr....

HAVING committed themselves to the proposition that all men are created equal, the Americans spend huge mounds of dollars each year in trying to correct the self-evident fact...

AT the beginning of his latest novel, The Secret River (Seeker and Warburg, I6s.), Mr. C. H. B. Kitchen reverts to the period of his first, Streamers Waving (1925). That early...

WALKER, R.N. By T. Robertson. (Evans, 16s.) BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE. By Dudley Pope. (Kimber, 18s.) IN The Golden Horseshoe Mr. Terence Robertson wrote the biography of Otto...

PILGRIMAGE TO THE SHROUD. By Group Captain G. L. Cheshire, VC, DSO, DFC. (Hutchinson, 7s. 6d.) THIS is the story of a very ill little girl who conceived the idea that she would...

Codlin moths used to be accommodating and breed once a season, but not now, by all accounts. There is more than one wave of pests. The defence is spraying with lead arsenate or...

BY IAN NIALL THERE comes a day in July when all the black- currants are ripe, the last of the gooseberries have been picked and even the mare's-tail torn out of the ground, and...

'Until you wrote about bird notes in the night recently I had hugged my experience as unique, for I had great comfort of a phrase of song which came at about 4 a.m. night after...

By PHILIDOR No. 59. H. LAWTON (Sheffield) BLACK (13 men) WHITE (9 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to last week's problem by Mansfield:...

On my way home I stopped at a gate and got down to open it so that I could bring the car through. Close at hand I saw a magnificent honeysuckle plant almost completely covering...

breathed its last, and now Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys, who first appeared in 1914 and still arouse nostalgic memories, have been banished to the back page of Tiny Tots,' says...

portmanteau words in 'Jabber- wocky.' Competitors were invited to compose a four-lined stanza containing original portmanteau words with not more than fifty words of explanatory...

ACROSS 1 Good-for-nothing, but he might get a Scotch salmon (6). 4 Adventuress behind the clock, but on hand (8). 10 'And these I do not sell for gold or coin of — shine'...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IT was a very adroit move on the part of the Government to abolish the remaining import controls on paper and board and paper-making materials (excluding...

By CUSTOS THE Stock Exchange remains surprisingly firm and if no serious labour trouble develops a further recovery could easily be seen. However, not too much /importance...

is now becoming anxious about the future. Since early 1955 it has had to bear the brunt of the severer monetary policy which the Government belatedly initiated to try to catch...

T HE banking community likes to flatter itself by recalling that 50 per cent, of the world's trade is conducted in sterling. The proportion holds remarkably constant. If...

BY ANTHONY RUDD T HERE has been something unreal about all the crises which we have had in this country since the war. Ministers have been full of warnings about what would...

at 831 flat. The flatness was chiefly attributed to some very large sales of Exchequer Bills by the Bank of England, in consequence of which the premium on these securities fell...

By DEREK MAYFIELD M OST of us, when we think of insurance, think in terms of the cover on our life or house or car. In other words, we are apt to regard it as incidental to the...

BY J. B. STEPHENS T HE Chancellor of the Exchequer has stressed over recent months the necessity for more savings and hence less money spent on goods which can be exported. Life...

BY FRED BENTLEY 1 , HE history of building society development discloses a pattern of alternating periods in which at one time there comes into Prominence the investment aspect...

BY P. N. WISE T HE Chancellor of the Exchequer's frequent exhortations to all members of this country to save have brought an increasing number of inquiries to the Unit Trust...