President Carter clearly sees this week as the climacteric of his presidency, as indeed it may be in political terms. There has for long seemed little chance of Mr Carter...

The new European age Ferdinand Mount Strasbourg Walking down the Quai Rouget de Lisle — he first sang the Marseillaise in this city — I was startled by a squawking noise. From...

Someof my best friends are hangers, but Iwill always have a slight preference for those of my best friends who are not. This may be very unfair, but I can't help it. Enthusiasm...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington For ten days the President kept his mouth shut and listened at Camp David, but the ensuing silence was destroyed by the ridiculous fuss over...

Murray Sayle Tokyo After hunting thein close to the edge of extinction, the Western capitalist world has, it seems, finally fallen in love with the great whales, the biggest...

The government have almost smuggled a Bill through Parliament placing an income tax of 1,per cent on the incomes of CharitieS, for the purpose of paying the expenses of the...

Richard West Last week a half-dozen Tory MPs called at the Vietnamese Embassy and gave a diplomat a letter asking him to explain how the policy of his country towards its...

Ian Jack Every week a copy of an Indian newspaper called the Swadhin Patrika, the Free Journal, is pushed through my letterbox in Islington. According to the small and somewhat...

Patricia Clough Bonn For the next 15 months West Germany will reverberate to the sound of a mighty battle as the country's two major politicians compete for the Chancellorship...

Jo Grimond As I keep saying, although no one takes the slightest notice, the main business of MPs is not to govern but to stop government. Their job is diametrically opposed to...

Christopher Booker On the tenth anniversary of the first tinues his series on books of the Seventies Fire On The Moon (1970). President Nixon called it 'the greatest week...

Tim Congdon The building societies are not noted for deep thinking. But last week they were able to think long enough and hard enough to decide that delay was the better part...

Sir: Mr George Heygate has written a mean-spirited and factually distorted letter commenting on Alexander Chancellor's remarks on the Vietnamese refugees in his Notebook for 30...

Sir: What is it about J.M. Barrie that makes Benny Green write of him with such scorn? So Barrie could not consummate his marriage because of early psychological wounds? Deeply...

Sir: If ever a man earned his wages it is the miner at the coal-face harvesting energy for you and me. There is no better time to witness the injustice of the tax on earnings...

Ferdinand Mount A Study of Nietzsche J.P. Stern (Cambridge £9.75) Nothing truly revolutionary can ever originate in the universities, Nietzsche said. He found the academic air...

Andrew Boyle The British Connection Richard Deacon (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) Richard Deacon is the pen-name of Donald McCormich, a former foreign manager of the Sunday Times....

David Cardiff A World in Your Ear: The Broadcasting of an Era 1923-64 Robert Wood (Macmillan £6.95) The curious thing about the autobiographies of BBC men of the Reithian...

Peter Paterson The Awkward Warrior: Frank Cousins: His Life and Times Geoffrey Goodman (Davis-Poynter £15) No figure in our society is so forlorn and neglected as an ex-trade...

Alan Watkins Fits and Starts Maurice Richardson introduced by Julian Symons (Michael Joseph £6.50) Maurice Richardson died last year. He was 71. His death did not create much...

Benny Green Memortes and Impressions Ford Madox Ford (Penguin £1.75) Ford Madox Ford was widely recognised as the biggest liar of his age, a charge he attempted to rebut by the...

Jonathan Keates ,A Pilgrimage of Passion: The life of Wllfria Scawen Blunt Elizabeth Longford (VVeidenfeld e8.95.) On 18 January 1914, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington...

Francis King News from the City of the Sun Isabel Colegate (Hamish Hamilton £5.95) From Bishop Berkeley and Southey to D.H. Lawrence and Middleton Murtay, people who have...

and Bruce (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs) There are two stunning theatrical moments in Tom Stoppard's latest Shakespearean spoof. The first is at the end ofthe opening scene of...

Time-warp Ted Whitehead The Spaceman and King Arthur (Odeon, St Martin's Lane) The silly season has suddenly arrived, with the school holidays bringing the usual flood of...

John McEwen Patrick Caulfield, familiar to Spectator readers as the designer of our Christmas covers, has an exhibition of seven new acrylic paintings at Waddington (till 28...

Expectant Richard Ingrams I have only just grasped the important fact that Esther Rantzen is expecting again. This is good news on all fronts. It is good news for Baby Emily...

Points of style Taki New York It is typical of the world without style in which we live that the President of supposedly the most powerful nation in the world has to take...

One leg over Jeffrey Bernard The past few days haven't been a lot of fun and the fact that three quarters of the human race, including the entire media force, were actually...

Enterprising Geoffrey Wheatcroft Mr John Junor is one of the great journalists of the age. I have in mind his column in the Sunday Express more than his editorship of the...