A rriving in London, Mr Rupert Mur- doch announced there could be 'no compromise' about his demand for 600 redundancies at Times Newspapers. Earlier, he had agreed to return the...

Vig and Zbig Ferdinand Mount this delicate juncture in our affairs, the key role of Iceland in the defence of the West is not to be underestimated. It is the chief United...

CF Eire SurNee mail Air mail Is months: £12.110 £13.110 E14.511 E18.511 One year: 1224.110 £26.110 E29.011 /.37.181 US subscription price: $65.00 (Cheques to be made payable...

O n Monday I discovered what the terrorists must have felt like when the SAS erupted into the Iranian Embassy. I was sitting alone in my office, trying to do s ome work, when...

Voice of the People A uberon Waugh T ike most people, I never examined the ..1—d detailed proposals put forward by Times journalists during their last crisis, by which they...

Xan Smiley I f tribal mathematics had permitted, Joshua Nkomo would have made a good _Prime minister of Zimbabwe. He lacks Robert Mugabe's sharp articulacy and pen- chant for...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington ConsiC onsidering the times, it was an dering bit of news. The hit musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, was being shut down on account...

Gerda Cohen Sharm-el-Sheikh F or 150 miles you pass slag heaps of grey grit like some desolate open-cast mining in Lanarkshire, mountains of rock spew, sudden dry gulches...

Equity Bar, and one of Sir H. Thring's Staff, has been appointed Legal Member of Council in India. The selection, though possibly an admirable one, will certainly occasion some...

Michael Davie T hese days, Mr Rupert Murdoch is cer- tainly a man to watch. The news from New York this week is that if its super- ebullient mayor, Ed Koch, becomes Gover- nor...

Olivia O'Leary Dublin E very time you complain around here about indecisive election results and hung parliaments, some clown points out that minority governments are A Very...

Richard West T he murder by the IRA of the Revd Robert Bradford, the Unionist MP for South Belfast and friend of the Revd Ian P aisley, has led to a by-election in which the two...

Jo Grimond C omewhere, someone in the Government seems to have calmed down the pressure to increase the penalty for rape. It is a horri- ble offence, but so are many others....

Murdochracy at work Paul Johnson R upert Murdoch's handling of the latest Times crisis confirms me in my view that there is a lot to be said for the pro- Pnetorial system....

Zero coupons Tony Rudd T he idea of a bond which doesn't pay any interest may not seem wildly attrac- tive at first blush. We have all ended up at one time or another with...

Sir: One does not expect to find rampant racism in a paper like the Spectator, but it is all there in the review of Todd's book on Luther, by A. L. Rowse (13 February). His...

Old Bean Sir: The mention of the Bean car in the ex- cellent review of Home James by Mr Arthur Marshall (13 February) brings to mind the fact that around the mid-Twenties the...

Sir: Alexander Chancellor in his Notebook of 20 February writes that the Post Office claims that, because councils are getting tougher about forbidding tenants to keep dogs in...

Sir: In his excellent article on the fall of Singapore (13 February) Murray Sayle, musing on the psychology of General Per- cival, writes that 'without the callous war- rior...

Sir: Does Richard West suffer from dyslexia, myopia or some less sympathetic form of slurred vision? In praising Australian films (6 February) he refers to Breaker Morant as...

Sir: I am grateful to Mr Peter Levi for his offer of a position as a slave in his household (Letters, 6 February) — surely preferable to starvation, probably preferable to...

Sir: Unfortunately, my surface-mail copy (28 November 1981) has reached me only now, but I should be grateful if you would allow me to comment on P. J. Kavanagh's excellent...

Sir: The eminent Taticanologisr , Mr Peter Hebblethwaite, reviewing George Bull's In- side the Vatican (16 January), begins by describing its 'spendid cover', noticing a...

Sir: The centenary of the birth of John Drinkwater, poet, dramatist and actor, occurs on 1 June this year. He was, of course, Barry Jackson's right-hand man at the opening of...

Sir: In his letter to you (13 February) Mr Evans of British Airways defends the record of his cabin crews. But Richard West (23 January) was criticising the total service...

Journalist-dictator Owen Chadwick T his is certainly a brilliant life of Mussolini. It is of the man, not of his time; it is Mussolini, not Mussolini's Italy; and men are not...

Anthony Storr W illiam Mercer, alias Dornford Yates, began writing short stories for the Windsor magazine in 1911, when he was a young, and mostly briefless, barrister. The...

Anthony Thwaite In Defence of the Imagination Helen Gard- ner (Oxford University Press £12.50) T owards the beginning o f these 1979-80 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at...

John Keegan H as anyone noticed that the Second World War isn't over? Choose the right day in summer, and the wrong place (the Andover Bypass vaut le detour), and you will get...

Ronald Hingley T hough Boris Pasternak was more of a poet than anything else, he is chieflY known to the world at large for his only long prose work, the novel Doctor Zhivago....

An Australian classic Lucy Hughes-Hallett 1 n his preface to the revised edition of this 24 year-old novel'Randolph Stow admits to the grandeur of the ambitions of his youth....

Francis King w hen I began to work in Japan at the end of the Fifties, I found that my students were perpetually consulting me about problems that had nothing to do with their...

Harriet Waugh D ame Ngaio Marsh, who died last week at the age of 82, was one of the last of a group of women detective writers (Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L....

CENTRAL ASIAN TRAVEL AND POLITICS 19th and 20th century works sought by author. Especially Younghusband, Stein, Hedin, Schom- berg. Peter Hopkirk, 32 Quarrendon St, London SW6....

Hard boiled and half baked Gavin Stamp r - lood Design' is a most elusive 1 4-1 commodity. Artists and critics have worried about the appearance of everyday, utilitarian...

At a distance Peter Ackroyd Ragtime ('AA', selected cinemas) N orman Mailer has never looked more like himself than here, where he is playing a part. His role is that of the...

Plain precision John McEwen I t is not exactly controversial of the Tate Gallery to mount a huge Landseer ex- hibition (till 12 April), but it is surprising enough to be...

Plugging away Richard Ingrams w ith every week that passes the BBC's output gets more and more trashy. One leafs through the Radio Times with in- creasing desperation looking...

Dead weight Mark Amory The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. ( Mermaid) Hedda Gabler (Yvonne Arnaud, Guilford) H itler is dead and so, for me, are books plays and films about...

Big Bad Apple Taki New York T ike the song said long ago, I'll take Manhattan. Well, only that small part of Manhattan that is commonly referred to by the chic observers of...

Shaken Jeffrey Bernard I don't have the most recent issue of the Sunday Times with me but if tnY memory serves me, which it doesn't often , I fancy that Sir Harold Acton was...

Jaspistos reports: Competitors were asked for a narrative poem in the form of three limericks. Said Tebbit, 'I don't understand 'em. If they really want jobs they can land...

No. 1207: History corrected Set by Jaspistos: Did the dying Nelson really say, 'Kismet, Hardy'? Did Alfred burn those cakes, or did he nobly take the blame for someone else's...