HE collapse of the story that the Government would use an easy Budget as a pretext for a snap election has left its sponsors looking a little foolish. Those sponsors came from...

In dismissing the Government of Kwaja Nazimuddin the Governor-General of Pakistan declared that it " had proved entirely inadequate to grapple with the difficulties facing the...

The heart of Buenos Aires last week burned almost as fiercely as the heart of Cairo fifteen months ago, and for much the same reason. The Government of President Peron, like...

Things look bad in Laos. Xieng Khouang, an important centre, has been evacuated by the French Union forces and occupied by a Viet-Minh division. Other towns have fallen. To the...

That is what a German newspaper called Mr. Cohn and Mr. Schine, Senator McCarthy's travelling investigators. They came to London after all, but they need hardly have bothered....

The.white population of South Africa has voted for the con- tinuing subjugation of the black, and the Nationalists' majority is large . enough to ensure that there will be much...

T HE Opposition did not vote against any of the budget resolutions when they were reported to the House of Commons on Wednesday, but by that time had settled upon two principal...

The exchange of sick and wounded prisoners at Panmunjom continues to operate smoothly. The most noteworthy feature is the fact that the Communists, blandly disregarding the main...

Next week the outward appearance of the Spectator will be altered. It will have a cover, in two colours, displaying a list .of the main contents. The opening page of the News of...

A correspondent writes: Naturally, that whim of Mr. Butler's logic to tax the Scilly islanders has greatly disconcerted most of them and secretly pleased not a few. Like...

p RESIDENT EISENHOWER'S great speech of April 16th' expressed so exactly a truly enlightened attitude to the new situation created by the death of Stalin and by the decision of...

a keen nor an accomplished dancer, and when at midnight we walked down the broad steps in front of which George I's horse caracoled demurely in the moonlight I could not resist...

of the Civil Service are obliged to do, among other examination papers, one on English. I know this, because the last paper of this kind was based on a thousand-word extract...

lupin seeds can be used as a substitute for eggs in pastry; Mr. Ken Tynan is being sued for libel by Mr. Donald Wolfit; and at two o'clock last Tuesday afternoon, in an open...

hunter rather than a chess-player. In action he was always. so to speak, well up with hounds, and in his diaries he displays for his own troops a brusque, unsentimental...

quite a lot of time climbing, or watching others climb, in and out of military vehicles, and I often wonder why their designers are at such pains to make this feat as difficult...

by Herr Hitler, to be impersonated upon the films by Mr. James Mason, and to have one's personal papers edited by Captain Liddell Hart—these are all contingencies which, in a...

to prevent General Franco's subjects from hearing any- thing at all about the Coronation are said to be based partly on the fear that news of this event might stimulate...

By NIGEL NICOLSON ET it be said at once that The Rommel Papers* are 1 - historically important, humanly- revealing and unfailingly 4 interesting. It could scarcely be otherwise....

N OT all poets die young. Wordsworth, Tennyson. Meredith, Hardy, Waller, Herrick lived to eighty or beyond; Yeats and Browning well into the seventies. But the lyric gift,...

Another Tongue The chimney swallows gossip:—` This sullen weather!" . "Those vulgar sparrows!" . . ."Eggs!?" . . . "The dearth of flies!" Or sibilant love-talk? . Well, I...

By MARGARET CROSLAND N OT a technical term from a psychological text-book, but the classification of one group of periodicals des- cribed in an American reference-book which is...

By BRIAN INGLIS Dublin. A N Irish writer who contributes articles about his country to the foreign Press sooner or later finds himself in difficulties. His readers do not want...

By LESLIE GARDINER F OR an hour or two we had been peering out through nasty scudding rain at the indistinct outlines of the islands around us. Then, as we came under the lee of...

For Love and Country By MICHAEL GASSMAN (University College, London) E were London University A.F.C. bound for Nimes, capital of Provence, but when we arrived our identity was...

FOR some years past boys have been in the habit of playing a game called " tip-cat" about the streets of London: the cat is a piece of wood pointed at both ends; it is struck...

novel. (Garrick.) , Tins was a play that-got all dressed up and had nowhere to go with outrageous costumes by Stanley Parker, perfume by Dior, settings by Glock, production by...

Tough and Tender. SIR HERBERT READ once divided cubists into the tough and the tender —instancing Leger, Feininger and Metzinger on the one hand, Braque and Gris on the...

THEATRE The Living Room. By Graham Greene. (Wyndham's.) SEXUALITY and religiosity, with a tincture of morality, are the very ingredients for popular success of the higher sort,...

(Song from a play) The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint, And earth's vast camber follows out, Twining in sleep, the oceanic curve, Reflected in the concave of the human eye,...

We thought we did this for ourselves, Working our will to know each other, Striving to come, like Plato's halves, Irreducibly together. All the world over it is known That when...

Journal d'un Cure de Campagne. (Curzon.)—The Desert Rats. (Odeon.)—Niagara. (Plaza.) Journal d'un Cure de Campagne is an austere but powerful adaptation of M. Georges...

The Gentleman from Glasgow By J. P. W. MALLALIEU 0 N Friday, April 17th, 1953, at about 11 p.m., in Piccadilly, a gentleman from Glasgow declined the advice of a gentleman from...

conversation of Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Apollo and Mercury, invited to Wembley to watch the Rugby League Cup Final as guests of the Govermnent. In what tones do gods talk ? I...

Set by Allan M. Laing Probably about half the poems written by William Topaz McGonagall, the Sweet Singer of Dundee, were concerned with Royally ; and had he been alive this...

heard discussing China with Mr. Basil Davidson was, I presume, the Reverend R. Elliott Kendall. Doubtless the fact that Strix was driving at the time led him to think the name...

SIR,—I am sorry to read from Sir Compton Mackenzie's animadversions on the " flaccid green straps " and " invalidism " of the agapanthus that he does not consider it a lily....

Stalin and his Successors SIR,----Once I was Thi Times correspondent in Tsarist Russia, and I have also visited it in Stalin's day. He was a ruthless man of iron will, and was...

SIR,—In the colliery where I work I know personally two lads who, while under the age of eighteen, since 1949 have worked on night- shift in rotation with morning and...

SIR,—As a participant in the militant suffrage campaign, I should like to express grateful appreciation of Honor Croome's review of Laugh a Defiance. Her horror at the "...

Sts,—Most artists who use abstract idioms do not much care how massive the ignorance is over their methods, or whether the public has a text-book on the subject or not. The...

.his entertaining article The Sporting Films that " an actor can act, but he cannot perform " and that, at least until the appearance of The Final Test, " the introduction of...

When the sun is shining and the larch is turging green, it only needs a little breeze to make things perfect, for the swaying of the soft green leaves and the sight of the neat...

Along one side of the road was a stretch of ploughing, and on the other the beach, a stony stretch that terminated beneath a low cliff where boulders covered with weed marked...

SIR,—The Committees of the National Theatre and the British Drama League have approved the plan of the late Geoffrey Whitworth for a bust of Harley Granville-Barker by Jacob...

Old S. once stopped me on the road to tell me how he and his wife had danced in their youth. " There was nobody like us," he said. " We was tireless. We danced everywhere, an'...

et,—Mr. Richard Usborne's timely plea for a research project on the muses which lead many people to write poetry in the spring will cer- tainly be welcomed by all those who...

IMPRESSED with the sociable behaviour of four jackdaws sitting side by side and close together on the same spar of a small pine-tree. watched them for a while. At length one of...

disappointing later; so it is written out, following the sowing of spinach, broccoli and winter cabbage and scarlet runners, and the planting find the planning of a vegetable-...

For years not few was Harris regnant where This day you fill the editorial chair; And prove "Avolso primo " still doth fit Since here " non alter aureus deficit."

Young Mr. Beerbohm Around Theatres. By Max Beerbohm. (Hart Davis. 30s.) BEFORE Sir Max Beerbohm became an institution—one of those institutions that the English see fit to...

Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559-1581. By J. E. Neale. (Cape. 25s.) THERE is something unique in the satisfaction that accrues to a man of letters when, in years of...

The Bolshevik Revolution : 1917-1923. Volume 111. By E. H. Carr. (Macmillan. 36s.) WrrH this volume Mr. Carr completes the first part of his projected history of Soviet Russia...

The Sea Coast. By J. A. Steers. (Collins. 25s.) The Channel Shore. By Aubrey de Selincourt. (Robert Hale. 18s.) Wrni every breaking wave the outline of Britain changes. A pebble...

" T. S. Eliot : Selected Prose," edited by John Hayward ; Max Beloff a number of recent books on Communism ; Martin Turnell " The Quest of Alain-Fournier " by Robert Gibson ;...

The Concept of Empire : Burke to Attlee. Edited by George Bennett. (Black. 18s.) The Concept of Empire : Burke to Attlee. Edited by George Bennett. (Black. 18s.) Tins series of...

WITH the memory of Forrest Reid, how many, how lively, how tender are the reflections called into the minds of those who knew him. Thoughts well up—the charm of his smile, of...

Tins military anthology is well conceived and admirably compiled : a book not only for the martial, 'but for all who love the more personal side of battles, the more human side...

OUR better English detective writers appear in force this month, to our great entertainment and gratification. Jenkin's Green by Ralph Arnold (Heinemann, 10s. 6d.) is a rattling...

years admirers of Gauguin's paintings have regarded these journals as the complement of his work. They have the same colour, violence, humanity and un- expectedness. " I should...

M. GUERNEY has chosen a misleading title for his anthology ; the sixteen New Russian Stories include such established favourites as Tynyanov's Second Lieutenant Likewise,...

IA Book Token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender of the' first correct ,,,lotion opened after noon on Tuesday week, May 5th, addressed Crossword, 99 Gower Street....

C' rosswor'd No. 725 Down cino.rinno ononmonn ionnomoomen mom annum= OMMOEMB n 0000 e milmomm nnnooaon MIMEUCim inn minammom min k. C MMEINOMD Solution on May 8 The winner of...

By CUSTOS STOCK markets have run true to recent form this week, with gilt-edged firm ; most industrial, rearmament and base metal shares easier ; and gold-uranium shares strong....