`It's all right. It's not an emergency. Mr Clarke has had a heart attack.' T he 'Guildford Four', wrongly con- victed of involvement in the pub bombings of 1974, were released...

1706; Telex 27124; Fax 242 0603 A LIFELINE T he press has been reporting that the Government is now to adopt a policy on abortion. This is not the case. What has happened is...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY — Save 10% on the Cover Price! RATES . 12 Months 6 Months UK 0 0 6.00 0 £33.00 Europe (airmail) 0 £77.00 0 £38.50 USA Airspeed 0 US $99 0 $49.50 Rest of...

A spell-binding performance by the Great She-Bomoh NOEL MALCOLM S torm Breaks over Rival Witch- Doctors,' said a headline in Monday's Times over a story from Kuala Lumpur. The...

NICHOLAS COLERIDGE B efore last week I had never heard of `the Shettles method'. And then, as often seems to happen with a new theory, it was explained to me three evenings in...

Time for us all to bake a cake with a file in it AUBERON WAUGH I must confess to a fairly complacent, hard-nosed attitude to British criminal justice. There was a card game we...

The United States is seeing neither terminal decline nor the triumph of liberalism. Ambrose Evans - Pritchard explains why he is optimistic Washington WASHINGTON has fallen...

RESPONSIBLE. Any government that wants responsible citizens can legislate them into being. It can't make citizens responsible, but it can hold them re- sponsible, which is...

Timothy Garton Ash on why change may be too fast for the new East German leader THE new East GerMan Party leader has the reputation of a hardliner. He rose through the...

After the earthquake, James Bowman reports on what upsets Americans Washington YOU might have expected a lot of people in and around San Francisco last week to experience...

Stephen Handelman experiences Gorbachev's ethnic nightmare Meysari ON THE main highway from the Caucasus to the Caspian oil port of Baku last week, our taxi suddenly bumped to...

Michael Heath

Dominic Lawson investigates an attempt to fool a computer and confound the very devil IT IS not easy to cheat at chess. Faust, still more ambitiously, attempted to cheat the...

Ludovic Kennedy argues that judges alone cannot be relied on to rectify injustices THE case of the Guildford Four is only the latest in a long line of miscarriages of criminal...

The chicken or the egg? THE old conundrum. Sir Peter Meda- war, the Nobel Prize-Winner for re- search on immunology and organ trans- plants, had no qualms about providing his...

Michael Trend watches MPs polishing their images, ready for television LONG gone are the days when Mr Glad- stone could hold the imagination and interest of his colleagues in...

The media: Paul Johnson thinks the Ogilvy case underlines the need for a change in the law IF WE had, as most people think we ought to have, a law protecting privacy, what...

After the trade figures, the jury is still out JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE Across the wires th'electric message came He is not better, he is just the same. awful lot of them — who...

THREE health warnings should appear on these bottles of snake-oil. The first would warn against the chronic defect of our European diplomacy, which goes back to George Brown's...

SCENE: a Swiss ski-ing resort. Enter a visiting Brit — JP, head of the family business, highly respectable — with the post. It includes a copy of the Daily Telegraph. How...

THE• Bank of England, required to admi- nister exchange control, took a libertarian stance from the start. H. A. Siepmann, head of the improvised department, put up a Home Guard...

Snake-oil merchants try to bounce the Cabinet with talk of an instant cure CHRISTOPHER FILDES T here is a lot of snake-oil on the market these days. None is more pushily...

Sir: As a devout admirer and follower of Giles Auty's views, may I venture to query his subscription to the hoary old cliché, `the modest and good-humoured under- statement...

Sir: It is odd, surely — or rum, as many of your contributors might perhaps admit — for a general to sit down to breakfast (Patrick Leigh Fermor's review concerning the Battle...

Sir: As a supplement to the fine article by Alexandra Artley on the Foundling Hos- pital (21 October), it may be appropriate to recall the valiant and finally successful...

Sir: In your issue of 14 October (Proven connection'), I learn that I am the sole witness, so far established, of that missing link, consistently denied by Sir Roger Hollis,...

Sir: I have lived in this Swiss paradise for 26 years. It is a somewhat unnatural life for foreigners. It is like living in a beautiful enclave or zoo, and we are the animals....

Sir: Your recent splendid cricket quiz concealed, in Question 33 (a), a further answer. Two England Captains played for Transvaal in the first Currie Cup Match; the first, Sir...

Sir: How very chivalrous of Robert O'Brien (Books, October 7) to suggest that women need protection from 'salivating monsters' such as myself. What a pity that he did not...

Sir: It is interesting that there are two ladies in the West Country who have never heard of Mr Jeffrey Bernard (Letters, 21 October), but remarkable that they should chance to...

The sad end of Tom Jones David Nokes HENRY FIELDING, A LIFE by Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R Battestin Routledge, £29.50, pp.738 H enry Fielding had one talent greater even...

K. N. Chaudhuri THE BRITISH CONQUEST AND DOMINION OF INDIA by Sir Penderel Moon Duckworth, f60, pp.1235 S ir Penderel Moon was a brilliant academic, a distinguished member of...

LAST week, in John Whitworth's review of On the Look-out: A Partial Autobiogra- phy by C.H. Sisson, the rank of under secretary should have been described as `not overwhelmingly...

Lawrence Osborne LORDS OF POVERTY by Graham Hancock Macmillan, £14.95, pp,256 0 ver the last 20 years, the images of the world's poor — the crowds of gaunt and devastated...

After three days dragging they found him, mouth in the mud, hair tangled with weeds and roots of water-lilies; and here and there about him whose careful fly — Dark Snipe and...

Laurence Lerner THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE W hat has Freddie Montgomery done? There he sits in prison, writing his story in the form of a letter to the judge, and though it is clear...

Nicholas Lezard A DISAFFECTION by James Kelman Secker & Warburg, £11.95, pp.337; RESTORATION by Rose Tremain Hamish Hamilton, £12.95, pp.371 A t the time of going to press...

John Whitworth NO LAUGHING MATTER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FLANN O'BRIEN by Anthony Cronin Grafton Books, £16.95, pp.260 E verybody I know who actually reads books has a copy of...

Raymond Carr NOT BY FACT ALONE by John Clive Collins Harvill, £15, pp. 334 T he Sixteenth Century Journal is about to publish an article entitled Who's on Top? Gender as...

James Teacher OUTSIDE DAYS, SOME ADVENTURES WITH ROD AND GUN by Max Hastings Michael Joseph, £14.95, pp.216 his is a collection of articles on coun- try sports that have...

The mystery solved D avid Esterly T he fire that swept through the state apartments at Hampton Court several years ago, damaging many of the palace's great Grinling Gibbons...

Cross-Channel culture Giles Auty The purpose of this preamble, other than to reiterate a possibly unreasonable dislike for leather sandals worn by men — an unfor- tunate trait...

Mindless merger L ast week Supporting the Arts, a review of the structure of arts funding in this country, was presented by Richard Wilding (until lately head of the Office of...

Surface impressions Celina Fox T o introduce the latest lavish compila- tion of interiors, Nineteenth-Century De- coration (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £50), the author Charlotte...

Book values Peter Watson I t used to be said of the two main auction houses that Christie's were gentlemen trying to be auctioneers, while Sotheby's were auctioneers trying to...

Still a Cinderella Francis Hodgson reflects on photography's 150th anniversary E ighteen thirty-nine is an entirely arbitrary date for the birth of photography. In that year...

Death in Venice (Glyndebourne) Death in Venice (Glyndebourne) Street Scene (Coliseum) Distinctly unsettling Rodney Milnes D eath in Venice is a distinctly unset- tling opera...

regular critics THEATRE The Cherry Orchard, Aldwych (836 6404). Another revival of Chekhov's classic, in an excellent new translation by Michael Frayn. A very strong cast...

Gang show Take I n the years of my youth, a period as it now seems approximating the Battle of Marathon, I counted among my many British friends such over-achievers as Charles...

Bouncing back Wendy Cope Fl urrying to catch a train to Manches- ter last Friday lunchtime, I was stopped by a British Rail official. Have you a boarding-card or a reserva-...

Playing it down Jeffrey Bernard The trouble is that these pros in Fleet Street can't recognise irony or a tongue in the cheek. Their trivial and inaccurate guesses irritate...

Burglars beware Zenga Longmore L ast Tuesday saw me struggling up the stairs with bagfuls of shopping after an arduous but fruitful excursion to the local market. Omalara lay...

IF THE sort of food which has made Anthony Worrall-Smith famous, those skimpy but elaborate starters and fanciful puddings that made up his self-styled `no inter-course' menu at...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers English Dictionary — ring the word `Dictionary') for the first three correct solutions...

Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1597 you were asked to write a villanelle about a scene which may have been pastoral once but certainly isn't now. There was such a large and...

Deep end Raymond Keene L ast Sunday the long-awaited clash took place between Gary Kasparov, the human world champion, and Deep Thought, the supreme chess computer. Kasparov...

British Rail romance library and two forth- coming titles, First-Class Fool and Excess Fare for Julia. You are invited to provide a publisher's blurb for either title (maximum...

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