Mr Wilson's decision is greatly to be regretted. His departure can bring no conceivable advantage to the Labour Party or to the country. In administrative experience,...

Mr Harold Wilson surprised everyone except the gossip columnist of the Daily Mail by announcing his resignation as Prime Minister 'out of duty to country and party'. He received...

Patrick Cosgrave He was expert in all the small things. When advising Mr Edward Heath on how to tackle Mr Wilson at Prime Minister's Question Time (a game which never...

John Mackintosh Harold Wilson has always had an interest in historical comparisons. When he showed new backbenchers round No. 10 after the 1966 general election, he took them...

Within minutes rather than hours of Mr Wilson's resignation on Tuesday the air of Labour politics at Westminster was fetid with intrigue. How many candidates for the succession...

As the tea-leaves settle Auberon Waugh The exciting news about Mr Wilson focuses attention once again on our decrepit party system. I wonder how many English people thrilled...

Henry Fairlie Washington Illinois has done it! In the first of these columns three weeks ago, I said that, within a month, the extreme conservatives would not have a candidate...

Patrick Cockburn The ceasefire in Lebanon which ended the ten months of civil war was always tenuous. It produced some signs of a return to normality : barricades were cleared...

Lord Goodman The announcement that a Royal Commission was to be appointed to inquire into the legal profession was not rated as the most exciting item of news of the day....

Kenneth Lewis Not having an incomes policy is nonetheless an incomes policy: it simply means 'Get what you can'. There are those who are against any guidelines, any restraint....

Keith Raffan Electoral reform is the latest campaign of the political trendies. The media have given the reformers full coverage and it was only with the debate at the...

Geoffrey McDermott It is no bad thing to reassess, from time to time, words like 'diplomacy' and 'intelligence' which, though bandied about in the media, remain rather opaque....

Bernard Dixon Britain's research laboratories are said to be simmering with discontent just now over the Government's continued failure to appoint a Chief Scientific Adviser....

The pound & franc exposed Nicholas Davenport The most accurate account of the sterling crisis last week was given—according to my inside' information—in the Investors...

Sir: Judith Acton's attack on the civilised administration, of Rhodesia and what she considers to be the delinquencies of British and American politicians in not forcing its...

Sir: In his City column (13 March) Nicholas Davenport chides the Man Alive Report (BBC-2) for failing to call 'one single witness in defence' of Mr John Bentley, the victim of...

by Patrick Marnham in the 6 March issue of your journal. Patrick Marnham bases his case against Israel on a book by the Israeli Professor Shahak, chairman of the 'Israeli...

Sir: Patrick Marnham alleges 'it is accepted Jewish teaching that medical experiments can be carried out on gentiles'. This is completely incorrect. The Chief Rabbi, Dr...

was an affront to all Jews regard less of the degree of their commitment to Zionism. It matters little that the attack is couched in 'anti-Zionist' terms. Mr Marnham makes clear...

of Roger Manvell's book The Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh (6 March) that the sixpenny pamphlet for which they Were tried in 1877 was the first cheap contraception...

Sir: There is another important objection to motor-bicycle helmets which Mr Waugh has omitted. (It is true that there seems a connection between these helmets and obesity,...

Sir: Mr Cosgrave has misunderstood Mr Enoch Powell's position on the trade unions. While it is certainly true that Mr Powell has taken great pains not to use the trade unions as...

Sir: Members of the Selsdon Group are in no need of lectures from Patrick Cosgrave on what Mr Powell has or has not said on trade unions—or anything else. Mr Powell is one of...

Sir: Patrick Cosgrave has maintained on more than one occasion that, under Mrs Thatcher's leadership, the Conservative Party has moved to the right. However, it is noticeable...

Sir: Ian Bradley says in his review of John Redwood's book Reason, Ridicule and Religion (28 February) that 'Christian apologists accepted and accommodated much of what the...

Sir: I have today been shown a copy of your issue dated 28 February 1976 containing 'Lawyers are not supposed to advertise'. Your remarks suggest I wished the publicity of Mrs...

Robert Skidelsky Spandau—The Secret Diaries Albert Speer (Collins £6.50) At seventy-one, Albert Speer can look back with some pride on three remarkable, in fact, outstanding,...

Peter Conrad The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History David Elliston Allen (Allen Lane £9.00) Social Science and the ignoble Savage Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge £6.00)...

John Kenyon The Transformation of Europe, 15581648 Charles Wilson (Weidenfeld and Nicolson E7.95) The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the...

Duncan Fallowell Moise and the World of Reason T ennessee Williams (W. H. Allen 3 .25) The Rabbi's Wife David Benedictus (Blond and Briggs £3.50) VV . ho can deny that Lady...

CLASSIC MYTH AND LEGEND by A. R. Hope Moncrieff MYTHS OF BABYLON AND ASSYRIA by Donald Mackenzie. THE LORDS OF THE ISLES by Isobel Grant (MacLehose, London) Box 681. DICTIONARY...

Benny Green Shaw: the Critical Heritage edited by T. F. Evans (Routledge and Kegan Paul £9.95) One time, in a magisterial review of his own receding youth, Bernard Shaw...

John Grigg From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter with a Biographical Essay and Notes by Joseph P. Lash (Andre Deutsch £6.95) Felix Frankfurter was an Austrian Jewish immigrant...

at Rogers George Crabbe's Poetry Peter New (Macmillan £4.95) F rom Aldeburgh to Accra, wherever two or more depressives are gathered together and Britten rules the air-waves,...

Peter Ackroyd Picked-up Pieces John Updike (Andre Deutsch £6.95) The idea, or at least the American idea, is that all the pieces—picked up from magazines, paperback editions of...

Clement Crisp Diaghilev Observed Nesta MacDonald (Dance Horizons, New York and Dance Books, London £10.50 until April 30; £12.50 thereafter) The brief Nesta MacDonald has set...

Gerrit Henry New York The National Book Awards, given in April to the year's outstanding volumes in various categories of writing, have this year been upstaged a bit by a brand...

Kenneth Hurren The only new thing in the London theatre last week was a theatre. It is hardly conceivable that you could have missed reading that the National Theatre—talked...

Four painters Richard Shone To reach ninety has something of a conjuror's trick about it. The Marlborough Gallery are applauding Oskar Kokoschka with a birthday exhibition of...

Alien Korn Rodney Milnes Die tote Stadt Korngold (RCA ARL3 E8.97) 'If Europe in the 'twenties had rejected Die tote Stadt as trivial candy-floss perhaps Hitler would not have...

Nice change Kenneth Robinson One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing Director: Robert Stevenson Stars: Peter Ustinov, Helen Hayes, Derek Nimmo, Joan Sims 'U' Odeon, St. Martin's Lane...

More likely Jeffrey Bernard First, the good news. Five consecutive days of television with no mention of the millionaire Russian novelist, Solzhenitsyn. Now for the bad news....