M r John Major, the Prime Minister, held out at a summit in Corfu as the only European Community leader not to endorse the appointment of Mr Jean-Luc Dehaene, the Prime Minister...

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 071-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 071-242 0603 PATTEN'S LAST STAND A this issue of The Spectator was going to press,...

The Sniggses and Postlethwaites on the Tory benches are secretly rather disappointed BORIS JOHNSON Mr Major figuratively placed his foot on the mounded belly of M. Jean-Luc...

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN O ne of the arguments put forward for Margaret Beckett as Labour leader has been that at least with her there won't be any sex scandals of the type which...

Now Mr Major is against Europe, he will, I suppose, have to go CHARLES MOORE Mr Major himself always showed a keen- er appreciation that not being Margaret Thatcher was not an...

between them is a nightmare. It has got more difficult since the principles which formerly dictated dis- tribution were abandoned.' It used to be the case, for instance, that...

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been called a silly stunt by a silly president in a silly decade. Well, it is true that President Kennedy was rather a silly president and the 1960s were a distinctly silly...

John Chilver England's fault Sir: 'What is Britain?' asks Tim Congdon (`Time for Britain to rediscover itself', 25 June), and then goes on 'England/Britain (the ambiguity is...

her for several years. But I was hired, after four years with ITN, by Mr Leonard Miall, then head of BBC TV Talks, not by Grace Wyndham Goldie. June), which was evidently known...

page with a reference to her subject being 'the only woman ever to look stylish in a uniform (she was Com- mandant of the Wrens).' That is nonsense. I could name several...

Alastair Forbes MARINA: THE STORY OF A PRINCESS by Sophia Watson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £19.99, pp. 255 1•11■1■1[MMMI_ publisher, Cass Canfield, and later married, as his...

fame . . . he was aware of his brain as an aggressive weapon. And finally here is Professor Weight- man's speculation about that: He liked the effect he could have on other...

a combined night- club and whorehouse, wherein he kindly entertained me (one of my first freebies), on the Left Bank and his party trick was to chew up and swallow wine-glasses....

green valey that is this alure but I xpect nun ov this terminoloji meens much if u doan no mutch about cassils. Or even if you do, young fellow. And yet while his spelling...

bourn all men return kind of prose — so traditional it is not There is much mention of fisticuffs, for which Donleavy claims to have had a certain talent, though I have heard...

Midwest of America — a place about to be swallowed up by an enormous (and environmentally unsound) cloud. The only place of safety is a long-past-its-sell- by-date space...

interest, is a churning set of four narrative voices. This is a Joycean, a Rushdiesque novel, with the elastic of a mixed-doubles final. The book opens with someone coming back...

AND 3 ni g hts in St. Petersbur g at the Grand Hotel Europe Whether in the white nights of summer or the crisp stark snows of winter St Petersburg is arguably Europe's most...

exhibition is a replica of his tomb in the Pugin Chantry Chapel in the church he built himself next to his house at Rams- gate. And really the show should have ended here. The...

role, a man who in the origi- nal I seem to have recalled as a male nurse rather than just another inmate, but the lesson of this revival is that the play does not have the...

. .$7 1 10Pir 5 S 5 `I was unfaithful so the Princess turned me into a frog .

desper- ately eager Gary Wilmot) fantasising him- self into a Euro-Disney pantomime complete with marauding pirates, this is a show with all the energy and charm of a dead...

The perfect nightmare Sheridan Morley

avoid any confusion with Copacabana — the Beach, and is written by Barry Manilow — the Composer, a man with a vast army of matronly fans but no discernible talent for the...

High life Bottoms up Taki

this time, it's The Wild Bunch with chicks, as Madeleine Stowe and her gang of whores on horse- back go about settling some old scores in the wild west. It's not a feminist...

newspapers described him rais- ing two fingers to the City in last week's price cuts. The fund managers who cried foul, spend their time committing non-stop fouls and getting...

- walk your dog

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be 'permanent'. But its perma- nence is a curse — like freezing Ibsen for all time with the original Victorian cast. What dates a movie is the actors: that's why only the Disney...

Best of the rest Raymond Keene This week I will chart some of the most dramatic or typical moments from the other three matches, which yielded Gata Kamsky, Michael Adams and...

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