Does Israel seek to provoke a new war with the Arabs? Is its policy to wreck any chance of an American-negotiated Middle Eastern peace settlement? Whether or not Israel's...

The general support for the Metropolitan Police in the action taken at the Indian High Commission on Tuesday of this week is not entirely welcome. There is a growing fashion in...

The Government's Counter-Inflation Bill has emerged from its Committee Stage pretty badly mutilated, from the Govern ment's point of view, but generally improved in the opinion...

I hear on what is usually described as most excellent authority that Sir Geoffrey Howe, Mr Peter Walker's fellow Cabinet minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, is...

Inadvertently I found myself watching children's television , last Firday. The programme was called Crackerjack, and the host in charge was Michael Aspel, who seems a sensible...

Lincoln's beautiful people Patrick Cosgrave It is, beyond question, a sexy by-election. " Oooh," said the nicest barmaid I met in one and a half days in Lincoln, "I'll vote....

In an article appearing in our January 20, 1973 issue under the heading ' Tory eunuchs in the schools ' we stated that the forms given to the children attending the conferences...

The guerrilla's quest to be heard Joel Cohen The causes that young terrorists, ' resistance ' fighters, anarchists, hijackers and letter-bombers pursue hardly matter to the...

Mujib, India and the elections Adam Watson Dacca There is today a very strong current of public feeling in Bangladesh: a Moslem reaction. Mujib's 'secular' policy is not...

PUZZLE IS SURPRISED to hear that Denis Healey still gets nervous before making speeches in public. Though the former Minister of Defence asserts that he "is nothing like as...

From its emerging and incomplete state one could see that Randolph Churchill's biography of his father was going to be a monumental work. Mr Martin Gilbert's revised version —...

Auberon Waugh The Black Prince Iris Murdoch (Chatto and Windus £2.50) Miss Murdoch's new novel is devilishly difficult to review at any length without revealing what happens at...

Clive Wilmer Two Poems James Merrill (Chatto and Windus £1.40) Love Poems and Elegies lain Crichton Smith (Gollancz 0.50) James Merrill is one of those American poets whom A....

Be! Mooney A Glasgow Gang Observed James Patrick (Eyre Methuen 0.95 hardback; £1.75 paperback) If you've lived in Glasgow all your life, violence seems normal. You get in...

John Keegan The Rescue of Emin Pasha Roger Jones (Allison and Busby £5.00) The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 18861890 lain R. Smith (OUP £6.50) Emin Pas'ha, German explorer and...

Clash of Generations: A Hapsburg Family Drarruz of the 19th Century Lavender Cassels (John Murray £4). Habsburg scandals have provided spicy topics for a multitude of trivial...

Bookbuyer There is some amusement in publishers' publicity circles about the difficulties Col lins are having in replacing Eric Major as their publicity manager. In some...

On the night last week when I saw John Kerr's play, Mistress of Novices, at the Piccadilly Theatre, there were more priests on hand than you'd expect to find in the paddock at...

Up from under Christopher Hudson The Other Side of the Underneath (' X ' Paris-Pullman) is one of the most awful, badly-made, dreary, repellent films I have ever seen. And yet...

Solo flight Clive Gammon The Wild Dogs of Africa, in the BBC 2 series The Woad About Us, came very close to being a remarkable piece of television, as far above the normal...

The Times is being extraordinarily coy about revealing who is to be the paper's new film critic, and naturally I dislike betraying a secret, but the anxious faces and bitten...

Print shop Evan Anthony Having been so lavishly ginned and hors d'oeuvred the other evening, compliments of Christie's 'private view,' I naturally feel a twinge of social (I...

Pot pourri Duncan Fallowell The uncanny hiatus between the Christmas and Spring rush gives one time to swoon over Rossettis, see Warhol's Trash, take Stockhausen's Momente on...

Benny Green Few items of news this year have heartened, me more than the recent announcement by the Advisory Centre for Education that there survives among our schoolchildren a...

The beefing ought to stop PamelaVandykePrice How now, costly cow? would be a topical greeting to one's butcher. But although I am as carnivorous as possible — I will happily...

Brock Peter Quince It is some time since I saw a badger in this parish, although I know of one sett at least which is still inhabited. Badgers are elusive creatures and both...

What is Britain doing? Francis Wintle They always say that in tackling the problem of man and the limits of his resources, we shall have to accept some limitation of our...

A new approach Frank Field A few weeks ago I attempted to bring together the available evidence to judge how effective the Government's anti-poverty programme has been. The...

Weighty matters John Rowan Wilson ' r bo you think you carry more weight in Washington these days?" asked an interviewer of the Prime Minister on his return from his recent...

Nicholas Davenport With seven-day money in "the street" securing a return of 11 per cent the lay investor must be saying to himself: "A plague on all my shares! I'm getting...

Hopes for Homfray John Bull The current climate of the market is most unhealthy for the speculator. On the one hand economic growth prospects look much better while on the...

Down under Nephew Wilde "There's been a lot of rubbish talked about the devaluation of the dollar," expounded an economist at a party I attended last week. "What you should...

The National Trust Sir, I had hoped not to re-enter the National Trust controversy. Miss Leach's second letter (February 10) seemed to call for no response from me. She has...

Sir: All right-minded, GMC-fearing medical men will applaud the courage and loyalty, if not the wisdom, of Mr M. R. Draper in venturing into print (February 17) in defence of...

Sir, — I read with interest, horror and eventually rage, the article on R. D. Laing by Anthony Clare (February 3). Whilst I claim no more insight into what Dr Laing actually...

Sir: The following may amuse you: Club Member: The lord alone knows what Heath will go to the country on at the next general election. Voice from armchair: Probably his knees....

Sir, In his review of Getting There by William Bloom (whose literary agent I am), Auberon Waugh writes: "It is no wonder that the Americans are losing interest in British...

Sir: Mr Tom Scott (Letters, February 10) is I think right in insisting that in evaluating Ezra Pound, or any other artist, the work is all that counts, not the deeds, and that...

After nonchalantly disposing of the nippy Tingle Creek and his fellow American expatriate, Inkslinger, over two miles a couple of weeks ago, the so far invincable Pendil reverts...

Sir: I too, met Gilbert Murray, not once briefly in the Reform Club, but repeatedly between 1919 and 1925 in his rooms at New College and his house, Yatscombe on Boar's Hill. In...

Sir: I was fascinated to read the Spectator's Notebook item ' Brittle, very brittle ' (February 10). The evidence advanced in suppor` of the contention that Conservative MPs are...

Sir, It is surprising that two at least of your readers should object so strongly to Mr Bevins's article on Mr Heath; this may not, as one commentator on the BBC remarked, have...

may one of your ' despicable ' readers ask what was the cost of posting a letter in those far-off unorganised days when Mr J. R. Bevins was PMG, and whether or not the Christmas...

Sir, There are two facts which we continue to ignore about Ireland at our peril. One is that the Irish Protestant minority has every right to respect, equality and civil rights...

Sir: There is nothing like the British "stream of filth " in France (Letters, January 27) only because a repressive French society will not permit it, and jails its publishers....

A Spectator's Notebook ' (February 17) strangely attributes to me the suggestion that Gilbert Murray's feats of " thought-reading ' were due to unconscious auditory hyperaes...

Murray had been called a fraud in the editorial columns of The Spectator, I should have had something to say about it. But now I find it quite unnecessary to comment. Doubtless...