'NEVER SPOIL WHAT YOU HAVE by seeking to have als o what you had.' The Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference this week developed into anything but a formal exercise in...

HE Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Con- ference has had some salutary negative effects. Its main sessions might just as well have been held in the Albert Hall for all the...

M R. THORNINCROFI'S Visit to the United States has had a surprising result. It seems that a truce has been declared in the long- standing defence dispute between Britain and...

Fr HE overseas trade figures for August were I distinctly disappointing. It will be remem - bered that Mr. Selwyn Lloyd had been banking upon a substantial rise in exports to...

ill: Seventeenth General Assembly of the M United Nations, just opened, is shrouded more in uncertainty than in the now-fashionable British gloom. Though the ideas of...

From Our Common Market Correspondent I T has been a desperately disappointing ten days. No one who has been, so to speak, within earshot of Marlborough House, whether Common...

By FRANCIS BOYD T FIE freedom of the press is justified if, taken as a whole, it expresses broadly the variety of opinion among the public whether authority (in whatever form)...

By LUDOVIC KENNEDY kiLltE V■ as a time when some people (and 1 don't mean only Taper) found Liberal Party Assemblies a bit of a joke; and to tell the truth there were times...

who with two or three others dynamited an electricity pylon near Glasgow and telephoned the police to tell them about it and solicit their prompt and (they hoped) brutal arrest....

1 'N1 all for more and better education, but at I the same time I'm not sorry that some clever children seem to decide at an early age that they have no interest in developing...

it to the Moral Re-Armers, not only for sheer persistence, but even more for their high degree of organi- sation in keeping up the attendance at their play Music at Midnight,...

the academic rat-race spins convulsively to a tem- porary stop around the humming heads of uni- versity registrars. The registrars have been over- whelmed by long-distance...

A friend of mine in the trade attended a seminar on television journalism held over the weekend. Most of the 250 people there were journalists anxious to learn how they could...

By KEITH KYLE A MAJOR act of reorganisation in the Congo is being pushed through to completion with re- markable vigour by the Central Government in Leopoldville. Every day...

At a Tory Party meeting, not long ago, after some explanation by an expert of the latest state of play in the Common Market negotiations, a stout patriot leapt to his feet....

By STEPHEN FAY T IIE New Left is exhausted. n barely exists in capital letters any longer. The movement was started by students in 1956 after Suez. Their heyday was during the...

batch of letters? First, Mr. White, there is an obvious and precise difference between a fertilised and an unfertilised egg: one has life and the other has not. And if it is a...

you published on August 31 on Mr. Ian Gilmour's visit to Delhi. In the course of this article, Mr. Gilmour states that there is reason to believe that China has begun...

of day and who is now adult, I am a little reluctant to believe that a man is the sum total of his limbs. Perhaps with the advance of medicine, public opinion, etc., the...

SIR. —The three letters on this subject that you pub- lished last week are. on their own evidence, from three obsessed anti-Christians. The juxtaposition is unfortunate for...

Sta,—I cannot believe that so intelligent a journalist as Monica Furlong is incapable of visualising situa- tions in which 'facts . must be withheld in the public interest.' It...

C. Brown Bhutan P. R. Bakshi 'Public Odium,' the Press, and PROs Stephen Parkinson British Voluntary Service N. E. Higgitt. M. Le Marchant Royal Flush James Dow Thy Naga Revolt...

Starbuck's paragraph on the Internati onal Congress for Monarchical Studies in Edinburg h ' _; you omitted two piquant little details: the Congre s _ was opened by the (Tory)...

allowed, as the parent of a Volunteer, to express MY sincere admiration for the present administration of Voluntary Service Overseas? My daughter returned from Kenya only a...

it should be made clear that VSO is but one of several British organisations which give young people the chance to serve overseas. In this respect, to title the correspondence...

Culture Collage By MALCOLM RUTHERFORD I is by now a commonplace that Centre 42 'Festivals are administratively chaotic. In Wel- lingborough, for instance, the first poster I...

Prospero and Caliban By NEVILE W ALLIS IT is an intensely moving testament of a humanist of rare vision and conviction, dispossessed and buffeted about twentieth-century Eur-...

The Next Generation By BAMBER GASCOIGNE THOUGH an addicted Brechtian, I didn't expect to enjoy Brecht on Brecht at the Royal Court; I dreaded an anthology of gobbets glued...

Black and White House By ISABEL QUIGLY its subject are welcome after the innumerable films we have had around lately about left-bank students, delinquent teenagers or (Pace...

Celts By CLIFFORD HANLEY NOTHING further has been heard of the BBC's curious proposal to merge Tonight and Panorama, and I trust that the project has been quietly cre- mated....

Merlin in the Market-Place By ICHEXI. MAC LIAMMOIR LL lovers of the greatest of Irish poets must be grateful to his wife for the brilliantly chosen selection she has made of...

DURING the First World War the politicians and the generals appear to have been caught up in such a frenzy of intrigue and personal ambition that it seems a wonder the war ever...

The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XI: l ems, 1870 - 1898. Edited by F. H. Hinsley. fi o • Here, for the last time, a fairly tradi- e v■Ith th e signPsower and influence...

IN many respects the period from 2000 ac to 1000 nc must remain the most enchanting .1" h istory. It saw the first stirrings, in four con tirl' ents, of what can properly be...

Sir Walter Raleigh. By Norman Lloyd Williams. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 30s.) BIOGRAPHERS find Sir Walter Ralegh irresistible. He has indeed something for all tastes. The romantic...

to reveal the cross-beams on which prisoners used to perch above a flooded floor. ,i d e n loung Adam Arnold-Brown by his side de- 'm at that moment that he wanted to come ` p...

The Demons. By Heimito von Doderer. Trans- lated by Richard and Clara Winston. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 63s.) THIS massive novel (more than 1,300 pages of it) certainly is a...

By KINGSLEY AMIS When they saw off Dai Evans's da The whole thing was done very nice: Bethesda was packed to the doors And the minister, Urien Price, Addressed them with...

A rattle, a woollen ball, A cuddly animal, A flameproof nightdress (Five to seven years) Is pretty. Water-colours And painting-book will Keep someone out of trouble And not make...

Can you stand sanity, committee virtue, Married, seeing its way, good-humoure d And humouring, over forty Thank God, enough to drive you mad, Or insanity with its Look at me...

By JULIAN MITCHELL NE can imagine the ghost of William Faulk- ner, as the storekeepers of Oxford, Missis- siPPI, closed their shops for a quarter of an hour in honour of his...

The Recognitions. By William Gaddis. (Mac- Gibbon and Kee, 30s.) The Lime Twig. By John Hawkes. (Neville Spearman, 15s.) God's Pauper : St. Francis of Assisi. By Nikos...

The End of the Road. By John Barth. (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.) A World of Men. By Michael Baldwin. (Seeker and Warburg, I6s.) Religion and Davey Peach. By Robert Holies....

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Tile annual jamboree of the international bankers is tak- ing place this week in Washington. Mr. Reginald . Maudling has gone to tell the IMF that its...

By CUSTOS D isApPoiNTtNG trade figures and disappoint- ing company reports have brought the recovery in equity shares to a halt. My colleague has given convincing reasons why...

ar - IOPTHALL HOLDINGS LTD., having di s- posed of its interest in Buchholtz and Co., is now purely a property and developing com- pany. In the year ending March 31, 1962•...

Don't Go Near the Water By LESLIE ADRIAN l tic Empress of Britain is a large, modern transatlantic liner which cost more than £6 million to build. None the less, if you were to...

I in a town as unlovely as Basingstoke. But if the plans for its redevelopment go ahead it will become one of the most civilised places in the country. I doubt if its 26,000...