assured that their copies will be delivered to them once the postal strike Is over.

Established 1828 99 Gower Street, London WC1 • Telephone: 01-387 3221 Telegrams: Spectator. London Editor: George Gale Associate Editor: Michael Wynn Jones Literary Editor:...

There now remains only parliamentary and royal formalities to be concluded before the Industrial Relations Bill is enacted into law; and, although we may doubt whether the Act...

It is well known that Mr Edward He tth disapproves of journalists speculating on the political future—perhaps a little surprisingly since seadogs are notoriously superstitious....

Parliamentary Privilege is one of the little bonuses you get when you become an MP. It means, crudely, that your freedom of speech, while being the same as everybody else's, is...

But if Lady Cromer is to be forgiven for her dotty gushings, what are we to make of our long-serving and most experienced man in Paris, Mr Christopher Soames? He is not at all...

B rand-new ambassadors ought always to be a llowed to drop at least one brick, and their Wives (particularly if they, the wives, are Pleasant and attractive and prepared to...

In order to reduce the risk of a man going Mad, men rely upon machines and Mechanical systems to operate what are grandly called 'fail-safe' procedures so that a nuclear...

Is that what you are telling the French, Mr Soames? Naughty boy. You know it isn't true. You really ought not to tell the French things like that; they might think you were...

It was reassuring that, when the North American Air Defence Command, one of its clerks having fed the wrong bit of tape into a telex machine (which is a thing I have done more...

'A few weeks before ground was broken for the high dam in 1960, the distinguished Egyptian hydrologist, Dr Abdel Aziz Ahmed, warned the Institute of Civil Engineers in London...

The Gospels according to. . . H. R. TREVOR-ROPER When I accepted an invitation from the Editor of the SPECTATOR to review Dr Dodd's life of Christ, I did not think that my...

Wednesday 17 February: arriving in London, the chairman of Lockheed warned that his sir- line customers had given only nine days for a decision on the RB 211. Rudi Dutschke,...

The great management hoax C. H. SISSON It is the pretension, precisely, of the elements now most influential in the Civil Service that that body is being managed with close-...

Men are we and must grieve DENTS BROGAN There is a great deal of in-and-out fighting going on not only in the artificial sporting club ring in the House of Commons, but in the...

Spectator MON MIN NM MINI NNE NM IMMIX The Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London W.C.1 Please supply the Spectator for one year n two years Cheque enclosed three years 0 NAME...

Richard Cobb on the Paris riots John Bayley on studies in German literature Reviews by Michael Jaffe, J. W. Burrow R. M. Hartwell and Auberon Waugh G. R. Elton on the Reign of...

An annual prize of £500 will be awarded by the SPECTATOR to whoever in the opinion of the judges, submits the best piece of original, unpublished, new writing of not less than...

A Confederate General from Big Sur Richard Brautigan (Cape £1.50) History of a Nation of One Jecon Gregory (Michael Joseph £1.75) tA Cure for Cancer Michael Moorcock (Allison...

Marx's Grundrisse Edited by David McLellan (Macmillan £2.50) 'The most fundamental of all Marx's writings'; 'the centrepiece of Marx's thought.' Such editorial fanfares...

For a man of twenty-eight, brought up in fin de siècle England to admire the Pre-Raphael- ites, it was hardy, almost foolhardy, to attempt a monograph on Raphael. In June 1906,...

Mr Inglis has written a long, straight- forward, undocumented and highly conven- tional social history of the industrial revolu- tion, concentrating on the poor and on attitudes...

'German', wrote Pushkin, 'is the only liter- ature in which the critics preceded the authors.' Pushkin in fact knew very little about it, but his perception has point : since...

Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 Daniel Singer (Cape £3.95) This is a very modish book. The author, who writes in Basic Marxisto-American ('When History Quickens its...

Regular subscribers to the SPECTATOR may be assured that the copies they have missed during the postal strike will be 'forwarded to them as soon as postal deliveries are resumed.

paste 9 Greengage 10 Avast 11 Enamel 12 Addendum 13 Runs in 15 Descants 18 Damag- ing 19 Arnold 21 Mistaken 23 Passes 26 Esker 27 Extricate 28 Testimonials. Down: 1 Bugbear 2...

No. 1470 DAEDALUS No prize is offered this week. The solution will appear in next week's issue. Across 1 Fodder instead of time. Cap that! (6) 4 Where one might suitably...

Ingrid and others KENNETH HURREN `Lucky devil,' remarked a friend whom I met last week on my way to the new Ingrid Bergman play, and I knew that he was not referring only to...

Nothing but the worst CHRISTOPHER HUDSON Mediocre films are the worst of all. Bad films a critic can get up and walk out of, but med- iocre ones he feels in duty bound to sit...

Round the bend Patrick SKENE CATLING Only a little earlier, James Mossman had devoted some of Review (snc 2) to help to get viewers in the mood for Cook. Mossman presented him...

Ethos and Andy EVAN AN,THONY It's been a shattering week for me: I've had to change my mind— twice. I didn't care for the L. S. Lowry exhibi- tion as much as I antici- pated I...

Sir: The protracted strike by the postal workers is largely the result of the present rationalisation stud- ies being made by the board of the Post Office Corporation. The loss...

Sir: Interesting that the unamiable Mr Amis rushes to admit that he has published statements intended to be damaging in your pages and since it is me alone, that he is cry- ing...

Sir: Whether as the result of a printers' imp, or through some Sporting attempt at improvement on your own part, eight mutilations of the text made my review of Nabokov's Mary...

Sir: Hugh Macpherson (20 Feb- ruary) tells us that the British must not vote in a referendum on EEC entry, because this might set a pre- cedent for rule by referendum, so...

Sir : Shirley Letwin (13 February) believes Chomsky has proved no- thing 'because no scientific theory offers "proof" '. This is a misunder- standing of the nature of science....

Sir : I am not a traditionalist, nor am I taking sides, but in view of our current blockade I felt you and your readers might care to know that, whilst recently sifting through...

Sir : My subscription to your jour- nal coincided precisely with your own arrival and I therefore have no basis upon which to judge the good or harm you may have caused the...

views on the present Common Market application so forthrightly and unambiguously. I only hope your opposition does not become so much of an obsession as did Biafra during the...

Sir: In the absence of your usual weekly competition (suspended. I hope, because of the postal strike rather than killed off) I am pre- pared to offer a sporting guinea (£1.05)...

Letters from Professor Charles Wilson, Geoffrey Sampson, Peter Paterson, Auberon Waugh, T. Francis Glasson, D. B. Taylor and others. Too many Town Halls Sir: You are right to...

I have been involved re- peatedly over the last few days in heady and abstruse discussions (not entirely to my taste) about the nature of the supernatural. In the course of...

eye-witness, or is closely de- rived from one, I should like to know how the following 'undesign- ed coincidences' (clear marks of historical truth?) can be explained away. The...

Sir: One or two of your corre- spondents refer to the papyrus manuscripts as though they were all negligible fragments. But some of them are quite extensive; one, dated about AD...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Two weeks ago the Council of the Stock Exchange called upon their broker members to disclose their transactions in Australian shares and their up-to-date...

My recovery campaign came to a sticky, futile end when the heavens opened last week and the only selection to brave the going, finished fourth in the wrong race. As the...

Not altogether to my surprise Dr Tom Margerison has departed and the matter of the succession has been resolved with the welcome arrival of Rupert Murdoch and his men in...

It has been drawn to my attention that my remarks concerning Mr Sam Wanamaker under the heading 'The Globe Theatre' in our issue of 6 February have been under- stood to reflect...

Though the Confederation of British Industry is in favour, on virtually any terms, of Common Market entry it is very far from the truth to say that most of its members prefer...

Xanadu Centre I have had a soft spot for Lonrho since they took over (by a share exchange) a few shares my mother had held for a long time in Anglo-Ceylon and.General Estates....

The British tend to be spectator sportsmen. 'Games' to them are either an indispensable adjunct to life, or an entertainment. Look at all those games people play on television...

Heaven knows, salmon fishermen have had enough to worry about in the past decade. First the virus disease, ulcerative dermal necrosis (IJDN), started to kill the fish in the...

The hunt had its annual meet just outside our village the other day. Now, in the matter of hunting the fox, the great majority of countrymen today are not at all well- informed....

TONY PALMER One of the recurring difficulties facing arts graduates leaving university is what to do with themselves and their apparent qualifica- tions. If you reject the...

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