Role models F ive kilogrammes of enriched uranium from the former Soviet republic of Georgia were due to be sent to the Dounreay nucle- ar reprocessing plant in Scotland, in an...

1706; Fax 0171-242 0603 ISRAEL AND BRITAIN A nglo-Zionist relations are usually written up as only having started with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. On Israel's 50th...

Why even a recession may not defeat Mr Blair BRUCE ANDERSON I t has been a remarkable year; Mr Blair seems to have rewritten the political rule- book. A year ago, three...

ANTHONY O'HEAR F rom 2 till 4 p.m. on Thursday, I was in the bowels of the BBC, recording The Can- didate, in which I was the 'expert', assessing the suitability of Douglas...

has abandoned her impartiality to become the People's President, with a view on everything from smoking to Ulster THERE have been moments, over this past New Labour year, when...

James Whitaker, Mirror royal correspondent, on the bitter feud that has embroiled the young princes, William and Harry AS IF the Princes William and Harry didn't have enough...

MY friend and far-from-token fellow woman columnist from right at the back has passed on an enquiry on a literally U and non-U matter. What, asks a reader from Berkshire who...

. only this time in the United States. Mark Steyn on the Republican leaders' non policies New Hampshire WHAT is the Republican party for? Unlike their enfeebled Tory...

Boris Johnson on how he got more than he bargained for when he appeared on BBC 2's Have I Got News For You WHENEVER we arrived in the country before 10 p.m. on a Friday, I...

EMU will fail, which is why we're better off out of it THE Nigel Lawson Diet now seems to suit its inventor. Gone are the days when I had to defend him as chancellor against...

Sion Simon becomes emotional again — a year later - about 1 May 1997 EVERYONE has an equivalent to the red box on the mantelpiece in my bedroom containing odd cufflinks,...

Peter Oborne says Lord Hurd's new fiction resembles Lord Hurd's version of fact MANY POLITICIANS write autobiogra- phies when they retire which reveal noth- ing. Douglas Hurd...

Michael Heath

A message from Vienna: Europe should stop whining and start bonking PAUL JOHNSON e assembled in the Palais Ferstel to discuss whether European civilisation was being...

Sir: Perhaps I am not the only one among your Catholic readers, of whom you must have at least several, to find offensive the hideous caricature of a pope, a cardinal and a...

Sir: Baldwin's famous attack on newspa- pers, borrowed from Kipling, as exercising power without responsibility is, as we should know, based on myth. In an adult democracy,...

Sir: Like your correspondent, Mr Samuel- son (Letters, 25 April), I also miss dear Aunty Alice (née Schlieffen). Alas, I am not myself a character in fiction, though there have...

Sir: Peregrine Worsthorne's infatuation with his new (black) friend, Darcus Howe (As I was saying, 11 April), seems to have addled his judgment. I resoundingly sup- port Charles...

Sir: Robin Simon in his review (Arts, 18 April) repeats Picasso's supposed descrip- tion of himself as 'only a joker who had understood his epoch and has extracted all he...

Sir: I don't take The Spectator regularly, but faced with a long train journey the other day I bought your edition of 18 April. Is it obligatory for your contributors to use the...

Sir: Sion Simon writes entertainingly about Le Monde in Cardiff (Restaurants as the- atre, 18 April) and captures, I think cor- rectly, the attractiveness of Cardiff's best...

Sir: Paul Johnson was throwing stones from a very exposed glass house in so vehemently attacking 'the general depravity of Britain's awful press' (And another thing, 11 April)....

At the Express and the Indie, nearly everyone's now in the wrong job STEPHEN GLOVER even weeks ago Tony O'Reilly and his Irish Independent group got complete con- trol of the...

A second look at the faithful David Gilmour BEYOND BELIEF: ISLAMIC EXCURSIONS AMONG THE CONVERTED PEOPLES by V. S. Naipaul Little Brown, £20, pp. 439 S it Vidia Naipaul...

Andrew Barrow FRANKENSTEIN'S FOOTSTEPS by Jon Turney Yale University Press, £16.95, pp. 276 A bout 20 years ago, I had lunch with the actor Peter Cushing at his remote, sea-...

Amit Chaudhuri FATIMA'S SCARF by David Caute Totterdown, £15.99, pp. 558 T his is a book that, as the publicity material points out in bold letters, 'no English publisher would...

Steven Runciman THE ALMANACH DE GOTHA, VOLUME I compiled by Charlotte Pike and John Kennedy The Almanach de Gotha, £60, pp. 704 n this present age, which we are often told...

12 Months 6 Months (52 issues) (26 issues) UK I0 £97.00 0 £49.00 Europe CI £109.00 CI £55.00 USA 0 US$161 GI US$82 Australia ❑ Aus$225 0 Aus$113 Rest of World ❑ E119.00 0...

Nigel Nicolson STALINGRAD by Anthony Beevor Viking, £25, pp. 494 A German soldier in Stalingrad, sur- veying the misery around him, was heard to mutter, They must never know at...

Bookortheke Fatima's Scarf by David Caute The novel no publisher would print `I think this book is brilliant. Fatima's Scarf is something very rare in English letters: a...

Robert Taylor CLASSES AND CULTURES, ENGLAND 1918-1951 by Ross McKibbin OUP, £25, pp. 562 T his often brilliant but frustrating book provides a graphic portrait of the social...

Ian Sansom A WIDOW FOR ONE YEAR by John Irving Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp.547 T he opening sentence of a John Irving novel is set like a gin trap; it clamps to your wrist, or...

Sophia Watson THE LAZARUS CHILD by Robert Mawson Bantam, £15.99, pp. 346 R emember The Horse Whisperer, the book that had every hopeful author dream- ing of the big time, of...

David Crane THE LATE MR SHAKESPEARE by Robert Nye Chatto & Windus, £16.99, pp.399 T here are certain books about which there can be no critical middle ground and Robert Nye's...

David Profumo TOUGH, TOUGH TOYS FOR TOUGH, TOUGH BOYS by Will Self Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 244 A ny newcomer to the work of Will Self might understandably be deterred by this...

Signs of the times Stephen Bayley on the influence and aesthetic qualities of posters M ilton Glaser, who founded New York's Push Pin Studio in 1954, is one of the great...

Grand A one walks round the exhibition of Delacroix's late work, Les Demieres Armies currently at the Grand Palais, time and again one sees images of wild libidinal energy —...

Parsifal (Royal Opera, Fesival Hall) Pain and rapture Michael Tanner 'T o show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this...

Theme dream Susan Moore orks of art have always been com- modities. Never before have they been products. To today's auction houses they are like any other luxury goods. If...

Sliding Doors (15, selected cinemas) Great Expectations (15, selected cinemas) Breakdown (15, selected cinemas) Two timing Mark Steyn T he last time I was conscious of Peter...

The Real Inspector Hound/Black Comedy (Comedy Theatre) New Edna: The Spectacle! (Theatre Royal Haymarket) What a laugh! Sheridan Morley W hat could be better than a classic...

Where are they now? Michael Vestey A fter 60 years of heroic failure and indolence as a Tory MP, Sir Plympton Makepeace lost his seat at the last election. How many Plympton...

Cool courage Robin Oakley I had backed the 16-1 shot Fine Thyne for the Whitbread Gold Cup, on the basis that it is a race often won by fresh horses rather than those who have...

A shameless age Taki New York welve years ago, in the midst of the Iran-Contra brouhaha, I attended the White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington and sat next to Fawn...

Life isn't sweet Leanda de Lisle A I've said before, there is something of the big cat about our brown labrador and recently he's taken to playing with his prey. He dug up a...

Happy return Andrew Robson AN expert defender usually 'knows the hand' by about trick four of five, based on his partner's signals and the way declarer is approaching the...

April but the powers that be added Shakespeare's birthday and World Book Day. I took part in the latter, riding in a Harrods bus from bookshop to bookshop with lots of authors,...

Royal game Raymond Keene ONE of the great opening highways of the 19th century was the King's Gambit, the Romantic opening par excellence. White sacrifices a pawn on move two...

The passionate North Jaspistos IN COMPETITION NO. 2031 you were told that recently, in a Swedish old people's home, two men, aged 93 and 80, both in love with an 82-year-old...

Imagine that both Scotland and Wales have become independent states, and that both have set up Statues of Liberty on their borders. You are invited to provide verses (maximum 16...

A first prize of £30 and a bottle of Graham's Six Grapes Port for the first correct solution opened on 18 May, with two runners-up prizes of £20 (or, for UK solvers, the...

4 F 2 A U I RC! T Milne D i2 C .1,.. 2 5 I 2 1‘1 L E 0 IIMMITIO T:ONOld '. 1 . ONGS l'X I N 111% OIX P -BERri ., . mituT 21 , R , I B A IN p I 31 P E A' IRAR T E I AN...

A close shave Simon Barnes LORD MacLaurin, former chairman of Tesco and present chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, summed up the qualities he requires from the...

Dear Mary. Q. Fifty-five years ago, when learning their language as an embryo cryptanalyst, I came a cross a passage in an old textbook explain- ing that the Japanese had...