The adversary system is basic to English law. Two sides, p r osecution and defence, battle it out, with magistrate, J U dge and jury acting as referees. The ethic of this system...

The gold watch syndrome by Ferdinand Mount Somebody must be wrong. In the past couple of weeks I have not met or heard of a single manager or journalist on a newspaper other...

A be t t he time of writing, it is still impossible to ti absolutely certain whether or not Times _ e ‘ A 'sPapers will suspend publication this weekend. But to judge only from...

Studies in contempt Auberon Waugh Minehead, Somerset Reporting restrictions on the Thorpe committal proceedings may have been lifted at the surprise request of Mr George...

Richard West Enkeldoorn, Rhodesia r,he diplomatic mission of Cledwyn rl, ughes, Labour former minister, is awaited ilere in Rhodesia with quite controllable excitement and some...

The Art world has been interested this week in a libel case. Mr Ruskin does not like those formless sketches, looking like pictures seen through darkness or fog, which Mr...

Nicholas von Hoffman Like a spider coming out from a crack in the rocks, Richard Milhous Nixon has emerged from his San Clemente exile to discover if he still has an important...

Edward Marston Berlin Profumo and Thorpe, Lambton and Jellicoe. These names, familiar to us, came strangely off the tongue of a young Berliner. She was comparing British and...

Peter Kemp Prague After the train from Vienna to Prague leaves the Austrian frontier station at Gmund it crosses a small iron bridge to the C zech town of Cesky Velenice....

Christopher Booker As I watched last week's brilliant, infinitely depressing Panorama film on the battles behind the scenes in Grays Inn Road as the great Times Newspapers...

Hugh Thomas Recently in Venezuela, during a discussion about the future of democracy, I ventured one or two remarks suggesting that the stability of democracy in its ancient...

Alistair Horne I suppose the occasions in an author's lifetime when he finds a platform to sound off on what he really believes are not all that plentiful. Last week I had one...

In the City Insider trading Nicholas Davenport Another puritan revolution seems to be coming upon us — a natural reaction perhaps to current public scandals. I detect it in...

Sir: By printing a letter (18 November) calling my friend Hans Keller a twat you would probably have been found guilty of obscenity until 1960, when the acquittal of Lady...

Sir: What's all this nonsense about Socrates being around in 500 BC (Nicholas Mosley in your issue of 18 November)? His date of birth is usually given as 469 BC and his period...

Sir: If for the sake of energy conservation we must change our habits, and assuming the correctness of Mr Hodgson's tenet that man's jobs are done most efficiently from dawn to...

Sir: Geoffrey Wheatcroft (25 November) is perfectly entitled to criticise the decision to lead the 8 a.m. Radio 4 News with the story that commercial television had bought...

his offending .tax i ' driver (Spectator, 25 November). N ot long ago, I hailed a taxi with its fc' r Hire' sign on. The driver told me that he was travelling in the opposite...

Street of adventures Alan Watkins The Sunday Times Bedside Book Edited by George Darby (Deutsch £5.50) The Best of Private Eye 1978: The Wholly Libel (Private Eye with Deutsch...

Auberon Waugh On Difficulty and Other Essays George Steiner (Oxford £5.50) Heldagger George Steiner (Fontana £1.25) George Steiner is not like other men. His prodigiously...

Anthony Nutting Sphinx and Commissar Mohamed Heikai (Collins £6.95) Mohamed Heikal and his helper Edward Hodgkin, a former Foreign Editor of The Times, are to be congratulated...

Benny Green James McNeill Whistler Hilary Tao' (Studio Vista £15) The Man Whistler Hesketh Pears° (Macdonald £5.95) The . Young Whistler Gordon Fleming (Allen & Unwin £11.95)...

George Hutchinson The Chinese Garden Maggie Keswick (Academy Editions .£15.00) Chinese gardens are very different from our own. They are 'wild' rather than symmetrical in the...

Elisabeth Whipp Beauty and Medicine R. AronBrunetiere, translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin (Cape £4.95) Since Adam delved and Eve span, Woman has tried to look her...

Francis King The Virgin in the Garden A.S.13Yatt (Chatto & Windus £5.95) From time to time a novel appears that cries out for evaluation, not by a reviesve 1 , 5 r like myself,...

Delight in the ugly truth John McEwen It is unlikely to have escaped your attention that 'London-Berlin ; The Seventies meet the Twenties', a series of cultural events arran...

Real life Peter Jenkins Look Out . . . Here comes trouble ( 018rePrayer for My Daughter (Royal Court) house) Mod el Merma (Riverside Studios) When realism returns to the stage...

Symposium Ted Whitehead Germany in Autumn (Scala) The films I reviewed last week anticipate Germany in Autumn with a neatness that is almost alarming. Phil Mulloy's In the...

Pseudette Richard lngrams I don't know whether it's the Christmas commercials, which always bring on a feeling of suicidal despondency, but I have been particularly aware...

Sitting comfortably Rodney Milnes The Marriage of Figaro (Coliseum) Maybe one reason that Jonathan Miller': very good new production for the Engl is ': National Opera has not...

Beastly farms Patrick Marnham ThatAnimal Farm is not usually considered a manual of agricultural practice may surprise no one. There were after all working horses on the...

Chic to chic Taki New York 'There's something exciting, wonderful and glamorous going on in New York right now. We've never seen anything like it. A review of it should be a...

Just deserts Jeffrey Bernard One of the less disgusting and more harmless of my infantile fantasies is the recurring one about making an appearance — or is it a sounding? — on...

Arts counsel Geoffrey Wheatcroft N ovember brings the season of mists (actually, this year it brought nothing of the kind, but the sweetest of St Martin's summers before the...