That said, it is important that the Con- s er vatives should at the same time make it e qually clear that what Mrs Castle has in niuld is a thoroughly odious Bill which l e ads...

On Tuesday, in the most remarkable maiden speech which the House of Commons has heard since the war, Miss Bernadette Devlin clearly indicated the goal of the Ulster civil rights...

Just fifteen months have passed since the removal of Mr Novotny from the first secre- taryship of the Czechoslovak communist party marked the opening of eastern Europe's finest...

Miss Bernadette Devlin, civil rights victor at the Mid-Ulster by-election, took her seat in time for an emergency debate on the Home Secretary's decision to allow British troops...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGII The Prime Minister may well have breathed a sigh of relief that a diversion in Ulster should have blown up again over the weekend. If so, he...

FRANCE MARC ULLMANN Paris—Until last weekend the electors of France treated the referendum campaign on General de Gaulle's proposals for regional de- volution with one vast...

ROME PETER TUMIATI Rome—Italy's strongest defences against pos- sible authoritarian attempts to seize power are the inbuilt lack of secretiveness of the Italian temperament,...

INDIA KULDIP NAYAR New Delhi—Fifty years ago a report on Indian constitutional reforms said territorial changes during British rule were not dictated by rational or scientific...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS The universe is slowing down rapidly and even- tually planets, stars, galaxies and cosmic dust will contract into a vast fireball—Dr Alan Sand- age,...

SECURITY IN THE 'SEVENTIES LAURENCE MARTIN Laurence Martin is Professor of War Studies in the University of London and defence correspondent of the SPECTATOR. The western...

MEDICINE JOHN ROWAN WILSON An important editorial in a recent issue of the Lancet has raised for discussion one of the basic, perennial problems of modern medicine. It poses a...

J. W. M. THOMPSON. Biafra has been written off prematurely before now but the latest news does suggest that the Federal forces may soon be in nominal control of the whole...

PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN I.et me take, as a convenient starting-point, the rumpus about Basil d'Oliveira. I am not concerned here to discuss the details of this dismal...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY These days I seem to be dreaming an awful lot. Sometimes the dreams are related to recent events, sometimes they aren't, but always they have one thing in...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD Certain discussions on television are doomed from the start. There was an example last Sunday when Robert Robinson and a panel of seven—a headmistress, a...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN The publication of a new edition of Chester- ton's Autobiography is beginning to produce a reassessment of his place in English literature. Of course,...

LAIN MONCREIFFE OF THAT ILK Andrew Sinclair complains in The Last of the Best : The Aristocracy of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 50s) that our...

SAMUEL BRITTAN According to a story going the rounds in the United States, Professor Milton Friedman, that country's leading free market economist, has remarked, 'What has...

CHARLES STUART One of the features of modern historical scholarship is the tendency to knock down current views with the unacknowledged help of the forgotten work of the day...

MICHAEL KASER In more than a century, one book=a politi- cally bowdlerised university thesis, locally published in the Soviet Far East—and a half- dozen articles are all that...

Frewin 28s) NEW THRILLERS Vintage draught PETER PARLEY The Day They Kidnapped Queen Victoria H. K. Fleming (Leslie Frewin 28s) Mr Campion's Farthing Youngman Carter...

The Police: A Study in Manpower J. P. Martin and Gail Wilson (Heinemann Educa- tional 84s) The view that a policeman's lot is not a happy one was first expressed in terms by W....

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH Recollections of Writers Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke introduction by Robert Git- tings (Centaur Press: Regency Library 126). Recollections of Writers,...

Hunting Tigers Under Glass Mordecai Richler (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 35s). M4 Richter's concern is mainly with Canadian, Jewish, or Canadian-JeWish topics. Despite numerous on-...

BRYAN ROBERTSON In a short story by Arthur C. Clarke which sets out one of the ideas he developed later in 2001, a mysterious pyramid-like object is discovered on the moon with...

OPERA JOHN HIGGINS Introducing his opera Hamlet to the Friends of Covent Garden some ten days ago, Humphrey Searle remarked that he had been considering setting a Shakespeare...

The plot thickens HILARY SPURLING Cat Among the Pigeons! (Prince of Wales) George Dandin (Theatre de la Cite at the Aldwych) Anne of Green Gables (New) Developments in the...

MUSIC MICHAEL NYMAN John Cage's most recent (1966) thinking on concerts runs as follows: 'I doubt whether we can find a higher goal, namely that art and our involvement in it...

Tax increases worked out at some 30s a head for every family in the country per week. Yet despite all this the progress made on the balance of payments was deeply...

CHARLES VILLIERS Charles Villiers is managing director of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. A look at the Budget must obviously start from the economic problems it...

REGINALD MAUDLING, MP This and the next two articles in our post- Budget financial survey analyse, from three different standpoints, the Budget • itself. The survey then turns...

J. D. SLATER Jim Slater is chairman of Slater Walker Secrities. The 1969 Budget seems to me to have been based upon incorrect principles and to contain several errors of...

INSURANCE NICHOLAS DAVENPORT . Life assurance continued its calm secular up- ward trend last year—the net investments of the life funds increased by over £800 million and of...

BANKING ANDREAS WHITTAM SMITH The clearing banks have become the least popu- lar units in British business. They have shocked their private customers by withdrawing from...

SAVINGS JOHN BULL Anybody who wants to earn a return on spare cash without risking the equity or gilt-edged markets (both highly uncertain at the moment) should be able to find...

CHRISTOPHER FILDES The bottom, every now and again, falls out of copper on—hitherto groundless—fears that peace may break out in Vietnam. In the same way, the City now glances...

FINANCE USA WILLIAM JANEWAY President Nixon has presented his budget to Congress and it reveals that his economic strategy is floating in limbo. It could .not be otherwise,...

ADVERTISING ROGER PEMBERTON How much advertising is devised to turn . luxuries into necessities, creating new demand rather than supplying a competitive answer to existing...

LETTERS From Melvin J. Lasky, Jim Powell, R. A. F. Howroyd, L. E. Weidberg, S. J. Noble, George Whitehouse, R. G. Wood, Rupert Jackson, George Scott-Moncrielj, G. Reichardt....

Sir: In his excellent article on the d'Oliveira affair (18 April), Christopher Hollis seemed rather too hasty in attacking Mr Allen and Mr Gilligan for withholding the...

portance, I hope you will allow me a rejoinder to Tibor Szamuely (Letters, 18 April). First, I of course accept his factual correc- tions regarding items in Khrushchev's...

Sir: Mr Weidberg (Letters, 11 April) is surely correct in saying that it is simply torture that elicits confessions by hardened Bolsheviks in Russian trials. The following...

Sir: 'One of the most notable things about his poetry as a whole is its signal failure to cele- brate or give any account of human love . . . poetically a sort of emotional...

Sir: I had a mind to read a work of fiction en- titled Portnoy's Complaint but crossed it off my modest little order for my bookseller after reading the battery of ecstatic...

Sir: J. W. M. Thompson, in 'Spectator's note- book' (18 April) regrets that no English school- boy can now expect to hear the grating voice of the corncrake in England's...

Sir: If Mr Horton (Letters, 11 April) is going to continue to spread allegations, without evi- dence, about the criminal nature of Biafran actions and intentions, singling out...

favourite resort of vanquished correspondents —the plea that I misrepresented his argument. Yet he still clings blindly and obdurately to the assumptions which I challenged and,...

Sir: Mr F. A. Bown (Letters, 4 and 18 April) shows in his attitude to student conduct a dis- turbingly bigoted conviction in his own moral rectitude, and in the consequent...

AFTERTHOUGHT TIBOR SZAMUELY Our Government maintains it is socialist. 'The Labour party is a Socialist party or it is nothing,' as Ramsay MacDonald used to say (or perhaps it...

From the 'Spectator,' 24 April 1869—Herr Twesten, on April 16, brought forward a motion in the North- German Parliament in favour of replacing the Chancellor, who, as...

COMPETITION A reviewer in last week's Times Literary Sup- plement complained that over the past six months one fifth of the novels he had reviewed had been - concerned with...

13 April all Greek newspapers were ordered to devote one page of their weekend editions to the re" printing, over the next two and a half years, of a selection of modern Greek...

PHILIDOR White Black 11 men 8 men C. Mansfield (Brisbane Daily Mail. 1921). White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 435 (Smith): Kt - Kt 7,...

Across 1 Where the Little Flowers grew (6) 4 Top skaters get a treat (3-5) 10 This is no puzzle to them (7) II Sicilian cat family (7) 12 Helpful bouquet for the lovelorn (6-4)...