The Common Market issue cuts through parties; and the Labour Party has no need to feel ashamed of itself because its Leader and its Deputy Leader have publicly shown the violent...

The decisions of the Chinese and American leaders that President Nixon should visit Peking within the next twelve months are to be praised without equivocation. To agree to meet...

SPECTATOR'S . NOTEBOOK Those who heard Harold Wilson in the House of Commons this Wednesday, expecting him to be murdered, heard instead someone who sounded more like an...

Mr Wilson's anxiety with his own party and in particular with those cads who sit beside him on the Front Bench with their purities all sullied, is largely because he believes...

How to betray Ulster T. E. UTLEY Mr Mallory's article on the Irish Question in last week's Spectator, for all its seeming objectivity, is directed to the single object of...

Mr Wilson's new clothes STUDENT OF POLITICS The press is trying to persuade us to see Mr Wilson as a shrunken and negligible figure who has learnt nothing and forgotten...

Grand Coalition CLIVE JENKINS Labour pro-Marketeers spent money like drunken sailors before and at last Saturday's special conference of the Labour party. They lobbied, wined,...

I've got here too late VERNON COLEMAN I was still in short trousers when I decided that I would like to be a doctor. My reasons were then simple enough; I had no great...

Thursday July 15: The CBI is to ask nicely 200 firms to hold price rises to 5 per cent or less for the next year. In return for price restriction, it expects reflation from the...

Spectator New Writing Prizewinner 1971 PAMELA HAINES This entry was awarded the first prize of 000 " You've to stay out while half five," said Arnold's mam, giving him a last...

Mashed bananas JOHN ROWAN WILSON The one certain thing about science is that it never moves in a straight line. One day recently I was reading an article in a learned journal...

*The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin together with Selected Related Letters and Sketches of Persons Mentioned edited and annotated by Helen Gill Viljoen (Yale University Press...

The Onion Eaters J. P. Donleavy (Eyre and Spottiswoode £1.75) Few novels have caused me such sustained and intense pleasure as Mr Donleavy's rambling gothic extravaganza....

Poetry towards Novel John Speirs (Faber £3.75) "The indivisibility of literature comes home to me more and more," muses Mr Speirs in a parenthesis towards the end of his book,...

Snobbery With Violence Colin Watson (Eyre and Spottiswoode £2.50) At my bedside, within convenient reach, I keep a shelf-ful of those books about Sherlock Holmes — I mean the...

Infallible? Hans Kting (Collins £2.25) The evolution of the theology of the Roman Catholic Church since the second Vatican Council has been a major subject of study, especially...

Denis Healey and the Policies of Power Bruce Reed and Geoffrey Williams (Sidgwick and Jackson £3.50) This is not a book for which its subject has great reason to be grateful....

Stanley Morison James Moran (Lund Humphries £5.25) For the last thirty years of his life Stanley Morison (consultant to the Monotype Corporation, Cambridge University Press, the...

In a situation in which the best new novels from England and America are bought for large sums by rich, wellestablished publishers, it becomes difficult for a smaller-scale...

CHRISTOPHER HUDSON After seeing King Lear ('A ' Prince Charles, for a three-week run) it is easy to realise why this of all Shakespeare's major plays has been least often...

KENNETH HURREN Authors with a story to tell such as Simon Gray retails in his new play, Butley, at the Criterion, are usually tactfully evasive about its locale. No such...

Unhappy family MARGOT NORMAN If a great playwright could write a great play without any of a great play's faults, it is debatable whether anyone would bother to stage it and...

RODNEY MILNES In the world of opera, it is the new productions which get written about and discussed in detail, while the bulk of the repertoire is mode up of revivals, of...

TONY PALMER One of the more moving documents of our time was published last week under the misleading title of Grapefruit. It isn't particularly amusing and isn't particularly...

If the Royal Shakespeare Company boss, Trevor Nunn, finds a job for the present drama critic of the Observer, Ronald Bryden, it will surprise no one except a scurrilous few who...

THEATRE Opening in London: The Old Boys, William Trevor's adaptation of his novel of the same title about the alumni of a public school, with Michael Redgrave returning to the...

Sir : Now that the gaff has been blown and we know that Mr Heath in a passion of self-opinion rarely equalled since the days of Charles I and never since those of Neville...

Sir: I too have heard what Skinflint reports (17 July), that certain City fathers are perturbed by the freethinking of those who occupy our visitor's pulpit. In fact, I am...

Sir: Mr Macpherson wrote that there are three distinct moral approaches to the racialist regimes in Southern Africa. I submit that there is a fourth approach to the position in...

Sir: Mr John Lennon and Miss Yoko Ono complained on television (Michael Parkinson show, July 17) that they have been abused by the popular press. On the evidence of their...

Sir: I was deeply moved by your touching little cameo 'Charity and dignity' (Notebook, July 10). It seems a great pity that the Rev Ian Paisley cannot be persuaded to preach...

Sir: Some months ago, doubtless at some expense, the Post Office informed me that I now had a postcode. Bully for them. Only they forgot to tell themselves as the telephone...

Sir: I hope I have misread Dr Rowan Wilson's essay (July 10). Ho states that a decision to abort a patient (perhaps to open her abdomen and womb and so destroy the foetus)...

Sir: I read with more than passing interest the letter from Mr Howard Thomas about the revision of the Conservative Central Office Candidates' List. A nephew of mine has just...

Sir: As one of the ' Jesuits ' to whom Hugh Macpherson referred last week, may I explain to him and to your readers, that a Conservative agent does not owe loyalty " direct to...

Sir: Dennis Hackett says the estimated circulation of the Sun is "said to be" about 2,080,000. Said by whom? The published, audited ABC figure for June is 2,352,126. The...

Sir: If we accept the gospel according to St Mark (Bonham Carter) as having the divine authority that he appears to believe that it has we learn that criticism of any racial or...

Sir: Old Julius Streicher would have been proud to publish that piece of literary ordure masquerading as a prizewinning example of The Spectator New Writing in the July 17...

Surr: Sae Muster Oberon Wauch (ur dizzy ca' Waw?) cannae unnerstaun whi' Uz Yins sez — uz vilent, stun'ed, hauf-wi"ed, yazhully druckn yins, spungin' on the tahx-peyer fur the...

Sir: The Press Counsellor of the Pakistan High Commission in London has informed your readers that his government had set up several camps in East Bengal for refugees returning...

Sir: I am working on the authorized biography of the late Lord Attlee and would be grateful if any of your readers who possess letters from him would send them to me at the...

Sir:One ground on which Mr Hollis finds Christianity superior to Isis and other worship is the readiness of Christians to die for their beliefs. But such readiness is by no...

Sir: L. E. Weidberg's tiresomely ubiquitous missives are presumably symptomatic of a sort of chronic publish-o-philia. That 'public figures' do not reply to them may not be for...

Sir: Whether our present wagecost inflation "would have galloped away much faster if the Government had not applied with such dogged persistence its deescalating policy in the...

Sir: Although we are aware that the Race Relations Bill was introduced to protect the immigrant population, it should surely cover the indigenous people also. Mr Harold Soref,...

Sir: John Rowan Wilson is probably right in asserting that psychoanalysis had never exerted such an influence here as in America. Nevertheless an oversimplified and distorted...

Sir: Re the fondling probable Indian of dubious sex and his/her very white girl friend, whose public caresses in front of Cambridge fishermen were so frankly described in ' The...

Sir: With the publication of Mr Wintergreen's letter in your issue of July 10, no one can have any doubts as to the correct name of the prospective Conservative parliamentary...

Sir: John Casey detects misrepresentations in my review of Edward Norman's A History of Modern Ireland (July 3). It is Casey, not I, who is guilty of misrepresentation. Casey...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Those of us who have been campaigning for reflation week after week were entitled to feel good as well as happy on Monday night. The amount of reflation Mr...

For its twenty-first birthday present next year, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes gets a massive £30,000 boost from De Beers and in the same week Benson and Hedges...

Chairman of the Iron and Steel Users Association, and of B. Elliott and Company Limited "Our tails are down. Our stocks are high. We'll forge ahead and never say die." Mr...

DENIS WOOD The Oxford Botanic Garden was founded three hundred and fifty years ago this year — on St James's Day, July 25. The gardens at Padua and Pisa in Italy, Leyden in...

The scarcity of swallows in many places this summer has been much remarked upon. Our village certainly seems to have fewer than I can recall in any previous year. The general...

"The young Clark Gable," somebody gushes, " Brando when he was just starting out...." Waiters bring caviare in a sturgeon of sculpted ice. Champagne corks pop in a discreet,...