M r Tristan Garel-Jones, a Foreign Office Minister, announced that he would leave the Government this year for person- al reasons. Mr Michael Heseltine, the Pres- ident of the...

NIGEL DEMPSTER h e head of the Guinness family, the 3rd Earl of Iveagh, died last June, aged 55, from cancer of the throat, while living at the Kensington home of his former...

Another shadow over the festive season AUBERON WAUGH I t is good news that Lynx, the animal rights group, has gone bust, but much less good news that the Duke of Hamilton, 54,...

Myles Harris deplores the scientific advances that could lead to us living for ever THE TWO great plagues of modern times are small children and grannies. Too many children...

John Simpson reports from Sarajevo on how winter has joined the other killers of the beleaguered Bosnians Sarajevo THE FIRST snow of the winter fell here during the night of...

Harriet Sergeant finds the best way to become a second-class citizen in Japan is to be pregnant Tokyo JAPAN'S birth-rate is one of the lowest in the world. The government has...

I WAS ON duty last weekend. As usual, this meant a couple of visits to the police cells, where the mad, bad and dangerous to know are sometimes taken to spend their Saturday...

Simon Courtauld makes the treasonable suggestion that the Windsors are not the only British royal family RECENT speculation about the future of the monarchy encouraged me to...

Tabitha Troughton finds out what makes young girls become nuns JENNIFER was a riot. A 24-year-old nurse from Birkenhead, she was the sort of girl you could easily imagine down...

S.S. Major: full speed ahead towards the media iceberg PAUL JOHNSON h is year the Government will have to legislate to curb the excesses of the media, which have reached a...

At the Treasury's mid-winter beano, the toast is: Absent friends CHRISTOPHER FILDES h ere is some mulled wine left over from the Christmas party, and the Treasury, mindful of...

Sir: Alistair Forbes always gives the impres- sion of being better informed about his old friends' sex lives than their biographers, so perhaps he could answer this question...

Sir: Ian Buruma writes ('Germany's deep well of hate', 5 December) of the right-wing demo he attended in Halle, Germany, on 9 November 1991, and of the press confer- ence that...

Sir: I read with interest Nicholas Farrell's article on the dangers of passive smoking (Passive smoking: the big lie', 14 Novem- ber). His barrage of statistics proves again...

Sir: Isabel Wolffs article, 'Domestic vio- lence: the other side' (28 November), is most welcome reading. As she implies, the situation is much worse in the United States. It...

Sir: Mr William Oddie is quite wrong to describe me as an enemy of Dr Graham Leonard, and as a regular contributor to the Tablet, and as an enemy of the present Pope ('No sects...

Sir: Does Paul Johnson (And another thing, 19/26 December) consider it never appropriate to boo at the opera? Perhaps he has never seen a bad production or, at least, not...

Sir: It does seem to me to be extraordinary, not to say deeply significant, that one can read two major articles (Hugh Massingberd and Paul Johnson, 12 December) on the current...

Reducing all that's done Raymond Carr THE MEDITERRANEAN by Fernand Braude!, edited by Richard 011ard HarperCollins, £25, pp. 664 0 nce upon a time Fernand Braudel seemed a...

Flowers are right at marriages and funerals. They speak as tongues cannot as, round the altar, clumped in graveyards, we take root. Their colours flare, unauthored and...

David Wright THOMAS HARDY: HIS LIFE AND FRIENDS by F.B. Pinion Macmillan, £45, pp. 438 T he best life of Thomas Hardy — if one excludes that purportedly written by his widow...

Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno WILLIAM BURROUGHS: EL HOMBRE INVISIBLE by Barry Miles Virgin, £14.99, pp. 238 hen William Burroughs lived in Tangier in the mid-1950s he was known...

Hilary Corke A MOUTHFUL OF AIR by Anthony Burgess Hutchinson, £17.99, pp. 347 P rofessional linguologists tend to know everything about language except how to use it. They can...

Richard Lamb THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER: GENERAL MAURICE GAMELIN AND THE POLITICS OF FRENCH DEFENCE 1933-1940 by Martin Alexander CUP, £60, pp. 573 R ecently biographies have been...

Simon Heifer TENNYSON by Michael Thorn Little, Brown, £16.99, pp. 356 O ne of the supposed bonuses of writing a modern biography of an antique figure is that it allows the...

A lash extracted clumsily. .. For nights and days the eye smarts and weeps. Have I been in a fight a colleague joshes me. Yes, I feel like answering, the fight, always lost,...

Art Down with the dustbin! Giles Auty issues a New Year challenge to our modernist art establishment earing Neil Kinnock speak some H weeks ago of the peculiar pressures of...

The Adventures of Mr Broucek (London Coliseum) L'Orfeo (Queen Elizabeth Hall) Cautionary tale Rupert Christiansen H ere is a sad but salutary tale. In my ceaseless quest to...

Into the West ('PG', Odeon Haymarket) Elenya ('PG, Renoir) On a white horse Vanessa Letts I nto the West catapaults you backwards to what it was like as a child being curled...

A monthly selection of forthcoming events recommended by The Spectator's regular critics OPERA Don Carlos, Grand Theatre Leeds (0532 459351), 8 January. Verdi's grandest...

Hamlet (Barbican) Cyrano de Bergerac (Haymarket) Misery (Comedy) The Gift of the Gorgon (Barbican Pit) Beyond our Ken Sheridan Morley A drian Noble's new Hamlet (on the...

An opportunity missed Martyn Harris W hen I was a child we all watched the Queen's broadcast after Christmas dinner. For my mother and Aunt Irene it was a religious...

Big Bagel blues Taki T he end of the year was perfect, with a great party thrown in honour of Nabila Khashoggi by her father the day after her wedding to Danny Daggenhurst....

Confessions of a 60-a-day man Nigel Nicolson I f your New Year's resolution is to stop smoking, find someone with a heavy cold and catch it. Even the most incorrigible addict...

Strong medicine Jeffrey Bernard A nother Christmas, another year. As Sue Townsend wrote in the card she sent me, 'Good riddance to 1992'. Christmas I no longer loathe. I must...

hope 1993 will be a turn for the better — '92 seemed to reach an all-time low. I am feeling rather guilty at having found an old fax, dated early November, nestling in the...

Gilbertian Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1759 you were in- vited to carry on Gilbertianly after a given first line (which came from the Full Chorus by Wauchope, Horsfall,...

Raymond Keene 0 n 10 January Nigel Short commences the most momentous match of his career. He plays the Dutch Grandmaster Jan Timman in the final of the world cham- pionship...

A first prize of 120 and a bottle of Graham's Malvedos 1979 Vintage Port for the first correct solution opened on 18 January, with two runners-up prizes of £10 (or, for UK...

Here we go again Frank Keating IT IS six years since I went to a wintry Heathrow not only to wish godspeed to an England cricket touring party but to follow them up the...

Dear Mary. . . Q. My partner and I have suffered the social inadequacies of a mutual friend for too long and we feel we must seek your advice to counter this problem. The...