T HE Budget and the transport dispute have tended to monopolise attention during the last few days; it needed Mr. Dom Mintoff to bring us back to unpleasant reali- ties abroad....

SPECTATOR ESTABLISHED 1828 - NUMBER 6774 - FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 1958 - PRICE NINEPENCE

So far, so good. But you cannot create a political movement on the basis of not being xenophobic, of being friendly to allies, and of remembering that the Republic's government,...

The full alphabetical index of contents and contributors to Volume 199 of the Spectator (July-December, 1957) is now available. Orders, and a remittance of 5s. per copy, should...

By PETER BENENSON um' like old times,' said the sergeant, as the noise of two explosions was followed by the frenzied bell-clanging of fire engines. Militarily the situation...

THE County Council elections and the Budget debate having finished, and Hoylake UDC having gravely informed us that the behaviour 6f the Soviet Government is beyond his...

for Northampton, has been reviving the idea of ar advertisement tax. 'The sort of marginal requirement that sells on mass advertising,' he told the Commons, 'is precisely the...

introduction: it has been widely reviewed and discussed in the press here, mainly as a result of the French Government's grotesque actions in first, though not banning it,...

that Pharos's Fleet Street friends imagine,' Sir Linton Andrews asks in our correspondence columns, 'why do the London newspaper proprietors and London journalists through their...

more so than the publications of the Labour Party itself. The most recent of them Plan for Steel Re-nationalisation, by John Hughes—is an exception. If it had been issued by the...

have in front of me a document issued by the Corporation's press department, purport- ing to be a comparison between the number of people who listen to sound radio and those who...

Workhouse Ward By PATRICK CAMPBELL I N the carnival year of the General Strike, on an icy April morning, two persons were travelling through the sodden English Midlands in a...

to attend this autumn's Royal Film Show. It was a worthy idea originally : to select a film of the year for royal patronage, and to stage a showing which would bring in several...

statement at the Mansion House that the Anglo-German talks had shown that there could be real friendship and agreement between the German and British peoples. But, according to...

By IAN GILMOUR B RITAIN became involved in the Middle East to safeguard her communications with India. But when in 1947 she gave India her independence she retained the...

By STRIX O NE of us is a Cabinet Minister. One of us died of drink last month. One is an earl. One committed suicide many years ago. One, 1 think, is an expert on Russia. One is...

APRIL 27, 1833 LAST night, Lord ALTHORP'S Budget was completely demolished. The Landed interest mustered strong, and, on the motion of Sir WILLIAM INOILBY, carried a reso-...

The Colour of Sadism By ISABEL QUIGLY No. Time to Die, (Odeon, Marble Arch.)—The Camp on Blood Island. (London Pavilion.) WE had two prisoner-of-war films q this week, and the...

Style in Context By BASIL TAYLOR MUCH twentieth-century art has tried to refute the conception of style which ruled the nineteenth century, an idea of style which resulted, for...

Too Much Material By JOHN BRAINE To set the new series, The Common Room, in a secondary modern school was a promising start. But none of the staff would have been out of place...

Tickling the Taste Buds By LESLIE ADRIAN A Iunderstand this is to be an Irish number, I ,must take the opportunity to give a recipe for that delectable after-dinner...

it ever possible that no world should be preferable to some worlds? Are there in truth no circumstances to which ... the destruction of human life presents itself as a...

Ihe Question of the Bomb Prof es,or William Empson, C. C. Wrigley, Canon L. John Collins March for Mr. Toynbee Major W. G I Shakespeare Cavalier Treatment A. Comerford Press...

Kristol has committed the naive error of con- fusing two quite different moral issues. He equates 'killing' with 'dying for.' He rightly states that 'The question is, always has...

SIR,—I wonder if Mr. Philip Toynbee could be per- suaded to leave his normal privacy to initiate a march from Trafalgar Square to Scotland Yard with a view to the disbandment of...

panions. Suggesting it could be argued that the Press Council's opinions are no longer taken seriously, he says, 'Certainly nobody I know in Fleet Street has any respect for...

Spectator published, I find it rather hard to be accused of 'rushing into print,' but never mind! Mr. Michael Joyce has very kindly drawn my attention to the biography of Sir...

week's Spectator it is stated : 'now that this bank [Commercial Bank of Scotland] hag merged'WIth the National Bank of Scotland . . .' This is not a fact. Discussions about a...

the Communist pattern of denunciation and betrayal of family and friends succeeds among the Russians and the Chinese because these people lack a sense of honour. But can the...

and I still am : despite the tone of my original opening remarks, I do not regard the reputation of the Spectator as a matter for frivolity. As to the statistical adventure...

SIR,—The Theatre Workshop Defence Fund, for which an appeal recently appeared in your correspon- dence columns, now exceeds the expenses incurred in the defence of Theatre...

SIR,—Your tribute to R. S. Rintoul and his associa- tion with the Spectator is very interesting, but has Paul Bloomfield not got astray with some of his assertions? Is he not...

On Growing Old By MILES HOWARD D R. EDWARD STIEGLITZ, described as an authority on old age and its problems, gave some advice in an interview recently on how to live longer. On...

TODAY THREE POEMS FROM THE IRISH Finit, by Maire Mhac an tSaoi (translated by the author) Frozen, by Sean 0 Riordain (translated by Valentin Iremonger) Aran, 1947, by Mairtin...

By KEVIN NOWLAN The State, especially in recent years, has undertaken a large and increasing measure of intervention in.the business sphere, so that at the present time the...

By chance I learned from them the marriage- contract And wondered at this check on the wind's light- ness; You were so unpredictable, spontaneous, Untamed like it, and lonely, I...

By EDNA O'BRIEN M v aunt and her sons had gone to the chapel since noon, and Granny carried her wicker chair and her two feather cushions into , the plantation, announcing...

On a frosty morning I went out And a handkerchief faced me on a bush. I reached to put it in my pocket But it slid from me for it was frozen. No living cloth jumped from my...

By JACK WHITE A FEW days ago I drove round a corner near Westland Row Station and saw three televi- sion aerials on the skyline in front of me. There is nothing new about...

By IAIN HAMILTON T N the time and place of my boyhood, with the bees of nationalism buzzing seductively in my blue bonnet, Ireland loomed happily large as a symbol of freedom,...

Free Trade or . By DESMOND FISHER E VERY Irish schoolboy has thrilled to the story L/ of Grattan's volunteers who placarded their cannon with the warning : 'Free Trade or This'...

loneliness, A buffer between the heart and a mind Briefly uneasy— To shorten the road Home from visiting, This time back there I did not hear. A light-hearted tune As the day...

Dilemmas of Socialism BY GEOFFREY BARRACLOUGH T HE dilemmas and contradictions of modern Socialism are nothing new. They reach back to the nineteenth-century origins of the...

A. Zeman of captured documents, Ger- many and Russia 1915-18, bearing on Russo-Ger- man relations from 1915 to 1918. The documents provide a good illustration of the differences...

By Way of Sainte-Beuve. By Marcel Proust. Translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner. (Chatto and Windus, 25s.) INEVITABLY all Proust's miscellaneous writings appear as a preparation...

The Triumphant Heretic. By Ernst Halperin. (Heinemann, 30s.) Tito is a politician of genius, a master-manager of the totalitarian Party machinery, but he is all this at a stage...

Tins is an incomplete American translation, from a German version, of what must in the original (eighteenth-century Chinese) be a gigantic novel. One seems to get an adequate...

In one were to judge the importance of a con- troversy by its effective life span, then the future of the House of Lords would rate as far and away the biggest issue in British...

My Father's Son, by Richard Rumbold (Cape, 15s.), unlike most autobiographies, clearly forced Itself to be written. Rumbold's father, a lonely, possessed, pseudo-Napoleon,...

The Present Age: After 1920. By David Daiches. (Cresset Press, 21s.) IT is perhaps not altogether Dr. Daiches's fault if The Present Age is so unsatisfactory an affair,' for his...

Shakespeare Reborn Threepenny Novel. By Bertolt Brecht. (Bernard Hanison, 21s.) If Chance a Stranger. By Charles Fullerton. (Harvill Press, 13s. 6d.) WHEN the English version...

The American Earthquake. By Edmund son. (W. H. Allen, 37s. 6d.) THIS selection from Mr. Wilson's non-literary articles written during the Twenties and earl) Thirties is...

A. E. Housman: Scholar and Poet. By Norman Marlow. (Routledge, 21s.) Tilts is, say the publishers, 'the first full-length study to be published of the poetry of A. E. Housman.'...

The Steadfast Man: A Life of St. Patrick. By Paul Gallico. (Michael Joseph, 12s. 6d.) PATRICIAN scholarship is in a state of high con- fusion. The trouble is that literacy was...

(1st Prize, 'American Chess Bulletin,' 1956) BLACK (6 men) WHITE (9 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's problem by Fink: Q -...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IF we are to live profitably, as I hope, with a capitalist regime for the major part of our mixed economy, it is important that it should be made to work...

By CUSTOS THE sharp fall in the Treasury bill rate to £5 4s ,' per cent., which followed on the cut in the Federal Reserve discount rate from 21 per cent. to 11 per cent., has...

Chamonix. 12 Grousing. 13 Scathe. 15 Aram. 16 Rebellions. 19 Retrospect. 20 Stab. 23 Office. 25 Well- head, 27 Blankets. 28 Arioso, 29 Stetsons. 30 On deck. DOWN.-1 Tanagra. 2...

ACROSS 1 One has to be crafty to get another tenant (6). 4 The Pride of the Grantly's? (8) 10 The goddess has a label on (7). 11 A visit, love, to us is heartless (7). 12...

Chambers's Dictionary has a habit of opening at the page whose first entry is the word 'serendipity.' This always makes me imagine a poem beginning: 'Is it an innate seren-...

Some while ago a paragraph in a newspaper began: 'There is still no news of the party of Jews that left Portobello on Sunday.' The usual prize money was offered for the most...