T he trend of falling interest rates in America, confirmed by the influential economist Mr Henry Kaufman, prompted the biggest one-day rise in share prices ever recorded on Wall...

Why Labour may revive Teddy Taylor rr here are few active politicians who can .1 remember a time when the Conser- vative Party was so popular with the voters and when the...

T he house in which I have lived for a number of years in a friendly part of Wales is up for sale (very cheap). The shortest poem written by Christopher Logue was addressed to...

UK Eire Surface mail Air mail 6 months: E15.50 IR£17.75 £18.50 £24.50 One year: £31.00 IRE35.50 £37.00 £49.00 US subscription price: $65.00 (Cheques to be made payable to the...

Christopher Hitchens C lever scientists have been able to recon- struct the whole frame and fabric of a dinosaur from the study of one surviving bone or mandible. There is...

Richard West Larnaca, Cyprus A soon as Beirut airport was closed by the invasion of the Israeli army, the Lebanese discovered another means of travelling to and from the...

Anthony Mockler T here is in existence a photograph, that will appeal to those who savour the irony of such things, showing Ted Rowlands at the Seychelles constitutional...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington B y tradition August is a month for pranks and small outbursts of madness. It is sometimes attributed to the heat on the prairies which makes...

Roger Cooper S ince 1975, some 21 Turkish diplomats, including family members, have been assassinated by members of ASALA, the acronym of the Armenian Secret Army for the...

Roy Kerridge P eterborough is not a favourite city of mine, and as I arrived in a hot, stuffy Bank Holiday coach I looked out of the window appalled at the crowds of surly ruf-...

Colin Brewer A cohol, as Jeffrey Bernard and Auberon Waugh enjoy telling us, is a wonderful invention and many citizens, in- cluding me, get a lot of innocent if expen- sive...

Doubts about Tebbit Paul Johnson T he SDP leadership would be well advised, in shaping their policy on the unions, to pay particular attention to the woes of Fleet Street....

Up and away Tony Rudd T his is the first time since the war that people in the City have been making very considerable sums indeed while those in industry and commerce have...

One of the most frightful massacres which Ireland has yet witnessed was reported here this day week as having happened in the county of Galway, on the night of Thursday week....

figure '800' was unfortunately omitted from the sentence: `Book dealers have got it into their heads that there are in the whole world no more than 800 collectors of rare books.'

Peace and human rights Sir: How does Mr Garton Ash know that not 'a single "unofficial person" from END' went to Warsaw during Solidarity' s overground period (21 August)? This...

deed' (14 August) does not vindicate Simon Courtauld's argu- Ment in the same issue that `to criticise Mr Begin's Israel is not to be anti-semitic'. On the contrary, the...

Sir: I appreciate there may be more world- shattering events than the present discus- sion about the derivation of runner-beans. Simon Courtauld wrote (Notebook, 7 August) that...

Sir: Your article by Richard West attemp- ting to convince us of the great `content- ment' of third world women (who, he seems to presume, have no feminists among their great...

Sir: I have been commissioned by Chatto & Windus Ltd to write a biography of the late Sir Compton Mackenzie who, amongst other things, contributed the column Sidelight to your...

Sir: Simon Courtauld's item on Marie Lloyd and 'If you want to know the time ... ' (Notebook, 14 August) sprang to mind when I was covering the High Court case concerning Sean...

Sir: In his review of the film Death Vengeance, a vigilante epic, your film critic writes (14 August): 'Chicago itself broods over the film like some doomed shanty town, wide...

Sir: It is good that the Spectator's columns contain forthright condemnation of Menachem Begin, and that Simon Court- auld (Notebook, 14 August) is so careful to distance...

Sir: Your coverage of the Falklands episode has cleared up one small point: whether you run a fairly responsible journal of the liber- tarian Right or a fairly entertaining...

A prose Browning John Stewart Collis T o start with we can say at once that Mr Donald Thomas has here given us the Works as well as the Man. Too often in biography the work is...

Peter Quennell O n 18 December, 1812, a new Russian ambassador, Count Christopher Lieven, presented his credentials at the Court of St James. Though loyal, conscien- tious and...

Terence de Vere White Progress of Stories Laura Riding (Carcanet New Press £7.95) 1 — Nive in at the deep end: An island is all around an island. An island is all round the...

Richard Ingrams T recently observed in my so-called tele- vision column that A J. Wentworth, 14 ' F. Ellis's saga of a poor old Pre!, schoolmaster was one of the few 8 0 °'...

Francis King B eware of any politician or clergyman who uses the word 'Nay'. Even more, beware of any writer who does so. In his In- t roduction to this collection of short...

SEASIDE GARDENING by Mrs Kellaway. Write Box No: 253 SG. DANGEROUS SKIES (1954) by Air Com- modore A. E. Clouston. Box No 253SG. BOOKS BY Sir Richard Burton — good condi- tion....

Alan Watkins T he story goes that in the days of the old South Wales Miners' Federation (before it became part of the National Union of Mineworkers) there was a discus- sion...

D. J. Taylor he experimental novel is stirring again, 1 and with a fiction list containing Josipovici, Maggie Gee and now this ex- traordinary first work by Sue Roe the...

James Knox The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in sixteenth-century Scotland Ian B Cowan (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £11.95) I t is impossible to like John Knox. He was...

Richard Calvocoressi t has become almost a cliche of literary I history that English writers in the 1930s were attracted to one of two sharply con- trasting beliefs: Marxism...

An overdue acknowledgment John McEwen A 1782 was the year of Cotman's birth and 1881 was the year of Palmer's death, in centennial recognition of these two events and thanks...

Adieu Duncan Fallowell Hamlet (Warehouse) J onathan Miller has promised that this is to be his last work as a director of plays. He has three operas in the pipeline, then he...

Soft porn Peter Ackroyd Puberty Blues (`AA', selected cinemas) A ustralia has more male transvestites per head of population than any other country in the world; I mention...

Lollipops Anthony Burgess Bernstein Halil/Mass/On the Waterfront (DG 2532 051) I was in Milan recently (to receive the Premio Branca, if anyone is interested) and in La Scala...

Unsporting Jeffrey Bernard T York last week for the Gimcrac k Stakes. British Rail took me there an d they brought me back and they never ceas e to amaze me. If I was on the...

Touche Taki Spetsai O h dear. Odysseus has finally been taken in by a geriatric Circe. After 30 years of carefully negotiating social obstacle courses and jet-set minefields,...

And there you sat, scribbling and crossing No. 1233: Improving the Bard Set by Jaspistos: "Shall I compare a sum- mer's day to you ... ?" Even Shakespeare must sometimes have...

Jaspistos reports: Competitors were asked to supply part of an ode in which a bird is unenthusiastically addressing Man or a man. It all began with Chesterton's 'The Skylark...

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A prize of ten pounds will be awarded for the first correct solution opened on 13 September. Entries to: Crossword 572, The Spec ator, 56 Doughty Street, London WCIN 2LL. The...

Round up Raymond Keene L ast week I promised news of the English assault on the Mexico Interzonal and the Junior World Championship in Den- mark. There is no lack of results...