The new strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT-II) signed in Vienna on Monday suits Mr Brezhnev. That is not to say that it is a Soviet ruse, a; cloak behind which Russian...

Budget psychology Ferdinand Mount In unravelling imbroglios, Jeeves always found it helpful to consider 'the psychology of the individual.' Denis Healey, more ambitiously,...

The offices of The Times in the Gray's Inn Road have begun to acquire a distinctly spooky quality. The front door is guarded by old and weary-looking pickets who seem to have...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington The television played the Blue Danube waltz, the camera showed Rosalynn Carter staring at Austrian baroque, while the announcers indulged the...

Nicholas Ashford Johannesburg One of the more successful propaganda lines expensively disseminated by South Africa's scandal-prone former Department of Information was that the...

Richard West Bangkok Roving reporters are often accused of basing their first dispatch on what they are told between the airport and the capital. I shall do so unashamedly. The...

Peter Strafford There must be something about the mountains, jungles and volcanoes of Central America, or else the mixture of Spanish and Indian blood, which makes it a...

Edward Marston West Berlin Last August a young waiter from East Berlin hijacked an airliner on a flight from Poland to East Berlin, and directed it to Tempelhof airport in the...

No offence to the Met Office, but weather for ecasting isn't the most reliable science In the world. And no disrespect to our own Planning department, but the oil industry has...

Peter Paterson The grim reality of life under the Tories hit the Trades Union Congress hard last week. Not because of lengthening dole queues — though the unions know that they...

Ian Bradley When Sir William Elliott, the newly reelected Conservative MP for Newcastle North was asked by a BBC reporter how he had managed to increase his majority in a...

Anthony Mockler Major Ryder, a somewhat hobbit-like figure, leaned on his lawnmower and pointed out over his ancestral acres. `Over there,' he said, 'about a mile away through...

Tim Congdon With every Budget the government publishes a slim, but factual, volume called the Financial Statement and Budget Report. From the colour of its outside and the s...

The action for libel brought by Mr Richard Horne Shepherd against the publisher of the Athenaeum, for articles in which he had been, it was contended, variously referred to as...

Does Europe exist? Sir: How much I agree with Christopher Booker that 'Europe' is a fantasy — and how much I dispute that it is harmless! All this `forging of ties' has been...

Sir: What has happened to the good old doctrine of catharsis — the .purging of the emotions by seeing them enacted on the stage — which was prescribed by Aristotle and believed...

Sir: , Christopher Booker's reflections on Darwinism, while interesting, have failed to point out the most serious defect of the theory of natural selection, Darwin's great...

Sir, With regard to Mr Nicholas von Hoffman's column in your 26 May issue, Your columnist unfortunately fails to understand that our litigation which reached the Supreme Court...

Sir: In his article 'Developments' (9 June) Patrick Marnham says that the planning regulations 'have succeeded in preventing the British countryside from responding to the...

Sir: Mr Ferdinand Mount writes of the Chancellor's Budget: 'You announce the biggest tax cuts in history and half an hour later all the Evening Standard says is 'UP, UP, UP –...

Sir: May I correct an inaccuracy in one of the two fascinating reports from Poland which you published last week. Peter Hebblethwaite refers to Piotr Skarga as a poet; a Jesuit...

Sir: This is a very hard letter to write. I don't mind showing my ignorance, but] don't want to be thought either stupid or spiteful. I know that Muriel Spark has been rich and...

Sir: Mary Kenny, discussing the recent exposure of two 'spiritualist surgeons' by several radio and television programmes, argues that a religious programme like Sunday should...

Two souls and minds Alastair Forbes Clementine Churchill Mary Soames (Cassell £7.95) Though the inscribed copy which was such a prized schoolboy possession was long ago first...

majeure of Winston's nature a wife first, a mother when it fitted. Though she delighted in her children when they were small and cuddly, they had to take second place. The...

Tim Garton Ash The Berlin Bunker James P. O'Donnell (Dent E6.95) The Siege of Berlin Mark Amold-Forster (Collins £6.50) James O'Donnell is an American journalist and an old...

Benny Green Who's Who In H.G. Wells Brian Ash (E1l 11 Tree £7.50) The usefulness of this series varies so widely from subject to subject that it would be unwise either to...

Ted Whitehead The Movie Brats Michael Pye & Linda Myles (Faber £5.25) Among the men who built the Hollywood empire were a shipyard labourer, a trolleybus conductor, a furrier,...

Patrick Cosgrave I!1 his introduction to the delightful collection, American rivals of Sherlock Holmes (Pengui n £1.25) Hugh Greene stresses the difficulty he had in coming to...

Francis King The Stories of John Cheever John Cheever (Cape £7.50) The first, both in position and in chronology, of these collected stories of John Cheever, 'Goodbye, My...

Rodney Milnes The Rake's Progress (Covent Garden) Die schweigsame Frau (Glyndebourne) Die schweigsame Frau (HMV SLS 5160) Finnish National Opera (Sadler's Wells) Everything...

Lost causes Peter Jenkins The White Guard (RSC, Aldwych) Piaf (RSC, Warehouse) The strangest fact about The White Guard is that it should have been Stalin's favourite play....

Half and half Ted Whitehead Days of Heaven (Plaza 2) In a dim week I took the opportunity to catch up with Days of Heaven (A) by Terence Malick, remembered for his successful...

In the depths John McEwen Photographs as investment may not be quite the boom they were, but the echo reverberates on nevertheless in galleries private and public. There are...

Real life Richard Ingrams The long television holiday is beginning and regulars like Esther are (thank God) coming to the end of their seasons. LWT's Weekend World is also...

Snorting Talc! Doctor Ricardo Snorto is a dwarf-like Brazilian who specialises in selling modern pre - Colombian art and borrowing Peruvian pure cocaine. He has nine sisters,...

Shopping lists Jeffrey Bernard If, in a thousand years time, sociologists and an thropologists — let alone plain apologists unearth the sort of shopping list that I aave to...

Set and match Geoffrey Wheatcroft Sport takes people in different ways. It is one of those happy things which divide men entirely regardless of class or intelligence. Some...

No. 1070: Do it yourself Set by Pat Blackford: Robert Frost wrote a poem about mending a wall, so in this do-it-yourself age can we have, say, Wordsworth on repairing a fuse,...

Tal is Tal David Levy Mikhail Tal is a chess phenomenon. He rocketed to fame during the late 1950s and within what seemed like no time at all he won the World Championship...