M R WILSON goes to Washington this weekend for the fifth time in twenty months in a no doubt vain attempt to displace the Australian Mr Holt from the top of the President's...

Summer is igoen out. Lhude sing Boohoo. Groweth gap and bloweth crap And springth the leek anew. Sing Boohoo. Wilson bleteth after Brown. Cousins singth Cu Cu. Woodcock...

By ALAN WATKINS L E SS than four months after he has won a crushing electoral victory, Mr Harold Wil- son's security of tenure, or lack of it, as leader of the Labour party is...

THE COMMONWEALTH By MALCOLM RUTHERFORD PHE Commonwealth appears to be breaking up 1 over the Rhodesia issue surprisingly quietly. For a body that has, at least in its present...

Seven 'Spectator' contributors offer their personal reflections on the events of the past ten days Anthony Burgess There was a time when I believed that evil and incompetence...

By NIGEL LAWSON T HE lonely furrow the SPECTATOR has been ploughing these past six months in advocat- ing devaluation as an essential element in any lasting solution to...

AMERICA From MURRAY KEMPTON NEW YORK M OST sophisticates have come to think of us as a managed 'people. The only American reaction which is held to count now, as he him- self...

THE CASE FOR DEVALUATION-2 By RICHARD PRYKE M R WILSON has thrust the knife of deflation deep into the British economy, which is once again being sacrificed on the altar of...

DEOPLE haven't made much of the point in r this week's economic debate in the House of Commons, for obvious reasons: but a further slide towards disillusion with our whole...

MEDICINE TODAY By JOHN ROWAN WILSON M ODERN drug treatment is one of the few things which reconcile most of us to living in the middle of the twentieth century. Speaking for...

THE PRESS By DAVID FROST HE Daily Mirror slammed into the 1 attack . WE CALL IT THE 'MIDSUMMER MADNESS' BUDGET . . . his statement in the Commons was a dreary repetition of...

July 28,1866 It is announced, though as yet not officially, that the Atlantic Cable has been successfully laid. When the last official telegram was des- patched, at 6.40 on...

AFTERTHOUGHT By JOHN WELLS HAVING prised my dis- organised life apart far enough to let in one and a half days of sunlit 'holiday' early last week, I opened a battered 1925...

No. 293. A. ELLERMAN BLACK (8 men) (Caissa, 1943) WHITE to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to No. 292 (Godfrey) : B—Q 2! n, threat. z . . . K—K 5 ; 2...

SIR,—Your point in 'Spectator's Notebook' (July 22) is a valid one, but the real criticism must be against the Hovercraft salesman for using the idiotic word 'knot' at all....

that there may still be a large number of illegal abortions after the present Bill becomes law. This will depend on its interpreta- tion. But if the clause relating to the...

the Conservative Political Centre Monthly Report to task for subscribing to the theory of national decadence. He quotes from the first page, where the Report mentions an...

70 Ennran From: G. B. Napier, Ben Patterson, Father Laurence Bright, Audrey Donnithorne, Quentin de la Bedoyere, Keith Mack, Laurence Hyde, G. Wynn Hamel, George Booth, John L....

the Cabinet he was applauded for having the courage of his convictions. When George Brown with- drew his resignation he was praised for his loyalty to his colleagues. Which of...

whether or not I am a Marxist. I am not, any more than I —or for that matter the Pope—am a Protestant merely by reason of having sympathy and respect for at least some of the...

Fr Laurence Bright, OP, editor of the association's journal and director of its theological studies programme, is a Marxist. However, Fr Bright is reported to have said that...

SIR,—Bill Byrom's review of The Magus (May 6) is probably typical of the general critical reaction to John Fowles's latest novel. Most of this comment has been quite...

StR,—Brave Brown, betrayed, ignored, until He was on Resignation bent. Poor George, he could not quite fulfil His Declaration of Intent. LAURENCE HYDE The Glebe House, North...

phrase. Whether it is true or not is a question of fact, not of emotion. And it would seem to be the duty of all those who believe it to be so—whatever their religious...

Sut,—David Frost devotes an entire article to `BEA and the Press' His thesis is that the press was absurdly slow in getting round to discussing the malaise at BEA after the...

Sts,—During the past few weeks various corre- spondents have written to complain of specific in- stances of BEA inefficiency and lack of consideration for passengers. The first...

Dir g MOM E - 1. THEATRE By HILARY SPURLING A LFRED 'MIRY. creator of Ubu, friend of Valery, Bonnard, Ravel; Picasso drew him and so did Beardsley. Rousseau painted his por-...

T HE recipe for making a movie is usually compounded of a little talent and a lot of money. For those of us who spend our time assessing the little talents, that heap of money...

TELEVISION T HERE are not many respects in which it can be said that being forced to run in double harness with radio has been a good thing for BBC television. One notable...

ACROSS 1. How to broadcast on cinemascope at a distance? (3, 3, 4) 6. Such love could become worship (4) to. Star hunter (5) it. Hat for highbrows? (3-6) 12. Support for feet...

ART M ORE and more July spills over into August from the point of view of activity in the London art world and it is the same in other countries except where the heat makes...

ACROSS.--1 Outhouse. 5 Apache. 9 Alfresco. 10 Misset. 12 Guitar. 13 Old-timer. /5 Archduke Trio. x8 Factory bench. 23 Uxorious. 24 Sphinx. 26 Italic. 27 Activate. 28 Needed. 29...

By JOHN HOLLOWAY rrinE present state of comedy is no laughing I matter. On the stage, our preferences are for absurdity and violence: producing Congreve or Sheridan tends to be...

(Collins, 42s.) The Liberals—What Happened? THE jubilee of the Historical Association has, perhaps rather unexpectedly, provided the oppor- tunity for a rousing exhortation to...

An Inquiry into Enoughness. By Daniel Lang. (Seeker and Warburg, 25s.) SINCE we are popularly supposed to be living in the midst of the 'white hot' scientific revolution which...

By PETER THORNEYCROFT W HATEVER else Mr Verrier manages to describe in his book,* it is certainly not an army for the 'sixties. Somewhere in the closing passages he does...

FROM the large corpus of Vladimir Nabokov's early work the novel Despair (first published in Russian and English thirty years ago) has now been rescued and revamped, and is here...

The Transfer. By Silvano Ceccherini. Translated by Isabel Quigly. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 25s.) The LB.I Brigade. By William Wilson. (Mac- Gibbon and Kee, 18s.) Mate in Three....

'FR 1E BOTCHY A HE OM By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Looking at the statistical record of the first half-year, one gathers that the economy was heading for a down-turn even before this...

By CUSTOS A TER the great political and financial storm, the markets on the Stock Exchange opened very quietly—with the lowest turnover for twelve months—but went sharply...

CONSUMING INTEREST ADRIAN By LESLIE What he does want to know is the sort of course listed in Pelican Books' University Choice? This 7s. 6d. tome offers an Ariadne's thread...

By LORD EGREMONT ONE morning when I was sitting in the shade read- ing a book on the deck • of a yacht in a splendid sunlit foreign bay, my kind host appeared on the scene. The...