Established 1828 99 Gower Street, London WC1E 6AE Telephone: 01-387 3221 Telegrams: Spectator, London Editor: George Gale Associate Editor: Michael Wynn-Jones Literary Editor:...

Before meeting Mr Heath, M Pompidou said The crux of the matter is that there is a European conception or idea, and the question to be ascertained is whether the United...

There has been a great deal of heated argu- ment and discussion among ministers, members and journalists on the real reasons behind the Prime Minister's Paris trip. It is no...

What look very like the death-throes of the Oxford Union have been affording many of us onlookers some sharp pleasure. Only students of excessive coarseness or extreme left-wing...

This reminded me of an occasion several years ago when my wife came to the head of the stairs to see a stranger standing in the hall below. 'Who are you?' she asked. 'What are...

I found it a trifle disturbing to read that Mr Heath regards his £22,000 toy 'Morning Cloud in' as` 'a bloody good investment'. Knovving plenty of people with boats, and h...

Lord Eccles's proposals for charging entrance fees for our national museums strike me as being sensible: so I suppose there will be a great hullabaloo from the idiots about...

Some Tory members of parliament at lunch here recently brought up the subject of the tariff on imported cars. It was a week or two before Mr Davies's surely calculated in-...

A few days ago. at Liverpool Street station I saw a black porter sweeping the platform. His sweeping was impeded by one of those railway carts which are used to trundle parcels...

And I don't suppose he'd have approved of an exchange that actually did take place at Liverpool Street station. As usual, hardly any telephones were working: only a couple in...

if he really puts the pressure on, if he really cuts back every rebel and gets Alec to present it to the Conference'. The speaker was not Sir Tufton Beamish but a young Labour...

SALLY VINCENT , The picture on the wall is more large than imposing. It depicts a hoard of statuesque back muscles in mid-writhe around the central figure of a rather effete...

Belly-button rag DENNIS HACKETT There was no doubt which was the best story of last week. Peter Harvey had it in the Guardian: 'Commercial Spies tap State Records.' Mr Heath...

Fish and widows HUGH REAY Last week the House of Lords was enveloped in the rich voice of Lord Booth by announcing the disaster that will overwhelm our inshore fishing...

Matter of degree BERNARD DIXON It's tempting to leave such intimidating con- undrums as the purpose of science to the philosophers, to working scientists (who know about these...

The tariff trail By 'AN ECONOMIST' So many clues have been scattered about in the last few days pointing to the true pur- pose of the Heath administration's economic policies...

Wednesday 12 May: Negotiations over British entry into the Common Market continued late into the night in Brussels. Mick Jagger married a Nicaraguan girl in St Tropez and there...

The war no one is winning BRUCE DOUGLAS-MANN It is impossible that Pakistan can ever again be one country. Its two wings, separated by 1,000 miles of India, by language and by...

The cleaning-up of J. Edgar Hoover DENIS BROGAN A consideration of American popular heroes since the First World War has comic possibilities if it gives rise from time to time...

Women beware women PAMELA VANDYKE PRICE It so happens that, although I have always been a journalist, I have never been employed full-time on a magazine or the page of a...

WEVIEWABOOKS . 1 1 Colin Wilson on George Bernard Shaw Reviews by Jack Bennett, Joseph Lee and Patrick Cosgrave. Auberon Waugh on new novels Edward Norman on modern Ireland...

Spectator ADDRESS NAME Cheque enclosed 7] MINI MEI MIN MINI MIMI NMI NEM 1 year (52 Issues) £6 The Spectator, 99 Gower Street. London W.C.I E10.50 ti Please supply the...

The German Dictatorship K. D. Bracher (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £8.00) A spectre haunts the historiography of Nazism—the spectre of secular, uprooted mass man, prised loose from...

Scanning, as I do every week, the shelf of novels to be published and trying to decide which can possibly merit the supreme ac- colade of a review in the SPECTATOR, I find a...

At Cambridge the critical weather-vane veers from Speirs to Spearing. Gone are the Green Man, the phallic castle. Gawain the culture hero. C. S. Lewis's onslaught on the...

Everybody who tries to think at all ser- iously or constructively about politics owes a considerable debt to Professor Galbraith for this pamphlet. The debt is in- creased by...

If Shaw was such an egoist, why did he never write an autobiography? And, even more to the point, why are his autobiographical fragments—so carefully collected by Stanley...

22 Parsnip 23 Nautili 24 Cantab 25 Stopping 26 System 27 Chargers. Down: 1 Malice 2 Nearly 3 Realise 4 Kaleidoscope 6 Avocado 7 Amethyst 8 Discerns 11 Bander- snatch 15 Coppices...

Charles Seaton reports: The Chelsea show next week is likely to provide us with the usual large crop of new varieties of flowers, fruit and vege- tables, many of them named...

A prize of £3 will be awarded for the first correct solution opened on 28 May. Address solutions: Crossword 1482, The Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London WCIE 6AE. Across 1...

No. 651: Worthy parts An acting career is in prospect for the school- boy who refused a caning for an allegedly improper essay. Competitors are asked to compose a letter from a...

No knack of the knock KENNETH HURREN It is a depressing comment on the low view taken by managers of Londoners' theatregoing tastes vis-a-vis those of New Yorkers that The...

Royal occasions EVAN ANTHONY years because of the inferior quality of the paint he uses—and poor Morris has had to stand by helplessly and accept that his 'sculptures' cannot...

Sugar baddy CHRISTOPHER HUDSON It is a cruel stroke of fate when a director's leading star manages almost single-handed to ruin his production t Gillo Pontecorvo who directed...

In at the deaths Patrick SKENE CATLING One of the most well written, well directed and well acted tele- vision plays so far this year was also certainly one of the nastiest....

Culture from on high TONY PALMER Of course, Brighton is not alone in this absurd Festival mania which grips the civic conscience once a year. I suppose out of embarrassment at...

Line-up for 1971 RODNEY MILNES The Festival is largely a post-war phenomenon, and one which grows each year. The range is bewildering, from small local communities gamely...

Sir: At the end of his interesting Personal Column, 'Running out of Cricket' (8 May) Benny Green, in discussing the ills of cricket and county cricket, says 'As Bowen observes ....

findings in his Per- sonal Column (8 May), but cricket lovers will hardly-be able to avoid his sad conclusion that the writing really appears to be upon the wall. I think,...

Sir: Wi.th reference to your leader on this subject (24 April) I should like to add that the public-spirited makers of the famous sex educa- tion film are clearly addressing...

Sir: Stella FitzThomas Hagan's letter on (Leninist) absolutism (1 May) was well worth reading. Against Leninism—very good: against absolutism—well, I wonder. There is one...

Letters from Mrs Winifred M. Ewing, John Bright-Holmes, Pro- fessor Stanislav Andreski, Hugh Berrington, Gerald Sparrow and others. Nationalists Sir: Hugh MacPherson sees the...

Sir: 'If one reads the old news- papers and periodicals of that time. which did so much to keep mili- tarism alive, one finds very little about glory and adventure and a...

Sir: Having picked up a copy of 8 May edition of the SPECTATOR after an absence of some years and prompted by Dennis Hackett's arti- cle on the tabloid Daily Mail, in which he...

Sir: In David Hare's review of my book Vintage Victorian Murder (I May) he suggests by implication that I am callous about death. This is untrue. 11 am deeply con- cerned by the...

Sir: The confusion of which Patrick Cosgrave complains in his review of The British General Election of 1970 (1 May) resides not in the book but in Mr Cos- grave's own private...

Sir: I was saddened by Leslie Halliwell's long review (1 May) of my A Mirror For England. More especially as I was just one of many undergraduates whose mid-'fifties Cambridge...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT The Secretary for Trade and Industry is not apparently unique in his habit of blurt- ing out embarrassing thoughts on financial and economic policy before a...

tield and Longchamp last weekend, Mill Reef clings to favouritism for the unflattering reason that each newly discovered rival proves a public flop. This, and the possibility of...

Good old J. B. Rubens FGA, managing director of Central and District Properties Limited is, I am glad to report, a regular reader of the SPECTATOR of long standing. In this...

Nigel Vinson, a contributor to the SPECTATOR and Chairman of Plastic Coating Ltd of Guildford has sold his company of which he owns 54 per cent of the shares to the Imperial...

Who killed Hanratty? by the Hon.Paul Foot of Private Eye left me as mystified as to the murderer's identity as when I began. For instance I should like to have known more about...

I hope my friend Mr Dyerson, Managing Director of the New Statesman, wasn't watching that excellent Bad programme on Sunday night Invasion of Privacy offering spy-and-pry...

The Directors of London Weekend Television still move in their mystifying way. Not for them the open faced admission of mistake or high handedness, but partiality in allowing Mr...

When, during the lifetime of the last Government, there seemed a very good chance indeed that a bill to outlaw coursing would succeed in reaching the Statute Book, the British...

As my taxi drew up outside the Grace Gates, I peered through the window and was pleasurably surprised, as always, to see that I was not after all the only man in London...

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