D ESPITE M. Pflimlin's brave words in the National Assembly on Tuesday night about his refusal to leave a power vacuum, that was pre- cisely the situation which his resignation...

has pushed everything else, even the announcement that a desperate Mr. Cousins is to try to spread the London omnibus strike to the petrol tankers and the power stations, into...

N orr Monday talks begin in London between officials from Commonwealth countries to clear the ground for the meeting of Ministers at the Economic Conference in Montreal in...

M R. FRANK COUSINS can count himself lucky that events across the Channel have taken up so much attention : otherwise his latest move would have been greeted with even more of...

By DARSIE GILLIE WITH 408 votes at his back against 165 M. Pflimlin none the less went to the Elyse in the small hours of the morning to tell the President 01 the Republic that...

THE House broke up for the hols without showing any signs of standing at the threshold of triumph or disaster, national or party-political. Indeed, Mr. Shin- well was moved to...

Saint Columcille's By COLM BROGAN S Amu COLUMCILLE'S was one of seven elemen- tary schools in Rutherglen, a burgh half- industrial, half-suburban on the outskirts of Glasgow....

the inhabitants' (including Africans), it argues that 'it was generally accepted that this was intended to allude to a majority of voters if only for the reason that it is a...

By STRIX w ee paneemayou: I said, donkey's years ago. The one who spoke English had already com- posed himself for sleep. 'Comrade Alexei say,' he drowsily muttered, `we think...

Executioners AT A THEATRE first night it is easy to spot the critics. They have the most accessible seats rather than the best seats. They are scattered round the edge of the...

satisfactory to the Scotland - ill for , the to of the Royal Burghs of " i "°tIand . . ought to be delayed till next session; 1 ,7 c if r passed in the present, we are sure it...

Go d-wottery By KENNETH J. ROBINSON There are, of course, some things about the show that not even the most critical devotee would wish to alter. Last week, when the wind was...

Communications By ALAN BRIEN The Troubled Past. By Leonid IN Russia no critic is allowed to express his opinion of a play until he has seen it twice. No such revolutionary...

Concert of Concertos By COLIN MASON [RECORDING COMPANIES: C, Col- umbia; D, Decca; H, HMV; P, Philips; R, RCA; V, Vox.] Tiir latest batch of releases in the HMV series of...

Ketchup, Anybody? By ISABEL QUIGLY Dracula. (Gaumont.) Orva of my fellow film-critics, finding me green and gasping on a sofa after the press show of Dracula (director :...

Plastic Stone By LESLIE ADRIAN ONE day about a year ago an exuberant and wealthy South African farmer walked into the offices of a firm of merchant bankers in the City...

What are they like at home? By MILES HOWARD W HEN one considers the continuing popularity of marriage as a social custom, it does seem odd that no one (as far as I know) has...

New Roads South Scotland's Employment Problems Power Sources in Scotland The Ancient Kingdom The Ancient University Butler Besmirched • JO GRIMOND, MP • GEORGE MIDDLETON • DAVID...

By GEORGE MIDDLETON * E coNomIc growth in Scotland dates back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. James Watt became prominent in Glasgow in 1764, and ScOtt's shipyard...

By DAVID MURRAY N 1903, when the late Sir Edward MacCoil I started work with the then Clyde Valley Electri- cal Power Company, very reasonable boiler fuel could be bought, as he...

By D. W. BROGAN T HE South British reader, confronted with a phrase like 'Mrs. McLumpha's Mortification,' might recoil in horror, dreading exposure to Caledonian pawky comedy....

By ROBERT TAUBMAN fin HE four Scottish universities are not so old 1 as Oxford and Cambridge, but they have behind them a longer tradition—certainly a stricter and less...

By MORAY McLAREN A MAN with a strong English accent was talking to someone behind me the other day as I was walking through one of the most gracious of Edinburgh's Georgian New...

Greene must have met some pretty odd ones if he thinks Jeffreys the best of them. He over- rode the law whenever his passions and prejudices were roused, bullied juries, raved...

Lord Goddard L. Blom-Cooper, Rose Macaulay The Princess and the Archbishop Geofirey Murray What are the Facts? Graham Greene The Failure of President Bencs Sir Geofirey Mander,...

on A. E. Housman (Post-Victorian Poetry, page 40) in recent Spectator issues. The fact is, as I•have written, that HOusman's metrical basis was syllabic and not in any way...

lack of truth in popular journalism. It is a pity that last week in his report from Algiers to the Beaverbrook press he should have suggested that General Salan was held...

&Il i —You will certainly upset one of your readers • if yoU allow Taper to potter out of his warm office and on to a wider, (albeit thermostatically heated!) stage as...

President Dr. Belies, wrote that the controversies ranging round this figure had now passed into the realm of history, but one might 'have wished that he himself would have...

SIR,—In your issue of May 16 Mr. Eller entitles his article 'The Failure of President Benes.' It is, surely, singularly unfair to place upon the shoulders of this distinguished...

SIR,—We in the advertising business arc all very much aware of the revival by the Labour Party of the old-idea of the tax on advertising, which Pharos mentions in your issue of...

Randolph Churchill once more repeats, as the truth,' that when Princess Margaret saw the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace on October 27, 1955, Dr. Fisher 'had all his...

Then with a final repetition, forced From acid tastes of thin remembrances, To flop from fence or paling stob to be A clod with clods, a smirching of the grass. Mirrors of...

Fit Audience Br FRANK KERMODE HAT meaning, if any, can one attach to the expression 'a key book of the .present decade'? It is used as a blurb in a new reprint of Mr. J. D....

Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Second Edition). By Frederick J. Hoffman. (O.U.P., 40s.) MR. HOFFMAN, Professor of English at Wisconsin, works steadily on through one modern...

The Angel-Makers: A Study in the Psychological Origins of Historical Change, 1750-1850. By Gordon Rattray Taylor. (Heinemann, 42s.) MR. RATTRAY TAYLOR is a wholehearted believer...

Dean Church. By B. A. Smith. (O.U.P., 30 ing Richard William Church to accept the dean s ' Church had been Rector of Whatley, a tiny Pa rP in Somerset, and he did not take at...

have a peculiar interest, for unlike the Aryans in India, the Hittite aristocracy in Anatolia, or the Greeks in the iEgean, their barbarian culture was not mixed, at an early...

Scotland Before History. An Essay by Stuart Piggott with illustrations by Keith Henderson. (Nelson, 15s.) THE very word prehistory was invented by a Scotsman, for, according to...

King James IV of Scotland. By R. L. Mackie. (Oliver and Boyd, 25s.) `OUR army was not handled with sufficient care. . . Our dearest father, made impatient by the sight of the...

of Tangier, 'the Traveller of Islam' who, in the fourteenth century, journeyed through Cen- tral Asia to India, crossed the Sahara, visited every Muslim State of the time, and...

(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 18s.) The People of Ship Street. By Madeline Kerr. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 23s.) THERE is a feeling that we have done away with the poor by passing...

En Suisse With a Carib Eye. By Edgar Mittelholzer. (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.) DUMAS was thirty-one when he wrote En Suisse; and although this is an edited translation, one-...

Thomps Telford. By L. T. C. Rolt. (Longmans, 25s.) IN this, the first book of a series dealing with British India, Michael Edwardes discusses the nineteenth-century empire and...

Vae Fictis The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories. By Evans S. Connell, Jnr. (Heinemann, 15s.) The End of Pity and other stories. By Robie Macauley. (Harrap, 15s.) FOR seventeen...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT But let no one suppose that the captain came down from the old ship's bridge and ordered Bank rate to be reduced from 6 per cent. to 51 per cent. That was...

By CUSTOS A LONDON stockbroker's report I was reading over the weekend advised the same sort of investment policy which I have been urging in this column. The emphasis is on...

Pr HIS week we comment on three well-known 1 rubber companies whose estates are situated in Indonesia. United Sua Betong is perhaps the leading rubber producer in Malaya. As...

ACROSS. — 1 Seascape. 5 Paynim. 9 Cocktail. 10 Bootes. 12 Grimm. 13 Cup- bearer. 14 Graphologist, 18 Channel stone. 21 Broughton. 23 Tiler, 24 Ossify. 25 Asperity. 26 Splash. 27...

ACROSS 1 Usual time, son (snag.) (12) 9 The steward's of age and his mood changes (5-4) 10 My co-operative friend in the varnish business (5) 1 11 Superior hoop, given an outing...

from a television interview with one of the fol- lowing on the occasion stated: Hannibal (after crossing the Alps); Attila (after the sack of Rome); the lady of the house where...

SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 430: Report by Blossom Given an example, competitors were required to produce a golden rule for each of the following occasions: a proposal of...

Solution to last week's problem by Bottacchi Q-R 6, threat Q x R. 1 . . . Kt-K 4; 2 Q- 6. 1 . . B-Q 6; 2 R-K 5. 1 B-Q 4; 2 R-B 3. 1 R any! 2 R-Q 3. Fine half-pin problem with...