e still cannot predict tomorrow's weather, 't alone the winner of next week's Derby. et at the start of the 'sixties, when America's ientists were still struggling to get an...

M Alain Poher, interim French president, in- timated that if elected to the Presidency next month, he will reopen talks with Britain on entry into the Common Market. His support...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH This Friday marks the second anniversary of the declaration of the Republic of Biafra, and it is peculiarly fitting that it should fall...

WEST INDIES LEOPOLD KOMI Leopold Kohr is Professor of Economics at the University of Puerto Rico (the nearest large island to Anguilla). As a theorist of viability of small...

FRANCE MARC ULLMANN Paris—Mr Ronald Searle has impressed upon the consciousness of millions of his fellow- countrymen, and not a few of us on .this side of the Channel as well,...

GERMANY MALCOLM RUTIIERFORD Bonn--A few days ago Herr Willy Brandt, the SPD (socialist) candidate for Chancellor and present coalition foreign minister, told a party meeting...

INDIA KULDIP NAYAR New Delhi—The 'bourgeois parliamentary sys- tem' or armed insurrection : this is the difficult choice facing India's communists. A breakaway group has...

HEALTH SERVICE JOHN ROWAN WILSON During all those bygone years when our left- wing colleagues used to assure us that Mr Aneurin Bevan's Health Service was the envy of the...

AMERICA GEOFFREY WAGNER Geoffrey Wagner is an Associate Professor at the City College of New York. 'This . filmed hodge-podge is allegedly the story of dancer Isadora Duncan....

EDUCATION MAURICE COWLING Maurice Cowling is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. There is a fear that the next twenty years will be very difficult in British universities. I...

J. W. M. THOMPSON Mr Heath has only himself to blame for the embarrassment his American trip has brought him. Anyone could have foreseen that he wasn't going to do himself or...

PERSONAL COLUMN ANGUS MAUDE It is now some forty years since Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses and Mis- sion of the University, examined the intellectual attack on...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD Probably because there was a terrestrial scale by which to judge size and speed, one of the most exciting shots in the coverage of Apollo 10, in my...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY Starting with Sir Robert Walpole, I make the Labour Member of Parliament for Huyton this country's sixty-ninth successive Prime Minister. Starting with...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN For most Americans who are not lawyers, the Supreme Court is simply the Supreme Court, one of the two most sacred institutions of the Republic. It is...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS Oh, isn't praying simply great When even saints are up to date? Now Christopher's travelling days are done And Barbara's jumped her last sad gun, While St...

PETER FLEMING Malvolio, Mr Pooter, Augustus Carp, Beach- comber's Mr Thake—these are among the many fictional characters who owe their enduring ' popularity to the fact that...

Gross (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 63s) Grub street PATRICK ANDERSON The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters John Gross (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 63s) Those emerging from the...

DONALD McLACHLAN The Canaris Conspiracy Roger Manvell and Heinrich Frankel (Heinemann 50s) I have been told that the high reputation of our security service for keeping aloof...

From the 'Spectator,' 29 May 1869—The result of the first examination for women in the Uni- versity 'of London has recently been announced. As Lord Granville mentioned in his...

A. L. ROWSE Island Treasure Roland Morris (Hutchinson 42s) One thinks of the eighteenth century as the age of the benevolent despot, but in Augustus Smith of the Scilly Islands...

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH The Build Up William Carlos Williams (Mac- Gibbon and Kee 42s) The Build Up is the concluding volume of Williams's trilogy, the first two books of which...

HENRY TUBE The Blind Beauty Boris Pasternak translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Collins! Harvill 25s) A novelist takes his reader by the hand and leads him into a large...

J. 0. URMSON The thesis of the unity of science, that all the laws and, hence, all the concepts of all other sciences can be reduced to those of physics, was formulated forty...

GEORGE EWART EVANS Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Ronald Blythe (Allen Lane: The Penguin Press 35s) This book has a wealth of wonderful material taken directly from...

RODNEY ACKLAND Peter Ibbelson George du Maurier (Gollancz 42s) Amongst the superabundance of variously fas- cinating reproductions in Leon& Ormond's George du Maurier are some...

PENELOPE HOUSTON The festival cinema at Cannes is a rather heavily bland, impersonal chunk of a building which last year, packed chock-a-block with in- surrectionaries, somehow...

Bodywork HILARY SPURLING The Magistrate (Chichester) A Flea in her Ear (Old Vic) Lysistrata and Oedipus Rex (Greek Art Theatre at the Aklwych) Consternation at Chichester and...

BALLET CLEMENT CRISP Captain Gronow records the story of a young lover forced to take refuge in a grandfather clock when his mistress's husband suddenly returns. He dutifully...

OPERA JOHN HIGGINS It was in Wetzlar, in 1772, that Goethe first met Charlotte Buff and fell half in love with her while still reserving a good deal of affec- tion for himself...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Goodness knows how many bear markets I have lived through. This is the sixth since the end of the war and if we could only manage our economic affairs like...

CUSTOS The ordinary share market, after its sharp falls last week, has been flat this week, showing no decided trend. Gilts remain friendless. A sign of the times is the local...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL When I started my first portfolio over eighteen months ago the Financial Times ordinary share index stood at 390. Today, after having risen to 520 twice,...

Sir: It is irrelevant for Mr West (16 May) to deliberately drag _ Kenya into his Biafra Britain article. The remarks he makes in con- nection with loans and technical advisers...

LETTERS From Lieutenant-Colonel H. R. Pelly, S. L. Muhanii, Richard West, Dr Israel Shahak. the Rev Stanley F. Clarke, P J. Wilde, Geoffrey May, John Kirkaldy, Miss S. E....

Sir: As against Lord Snow (Letters, 16 May), I must assert that I 'do read the current literature about biogenetics. However, I con- sider that at the present state of knowledge...

am unfair to the left because the last Labour party conference carried a resolution calling upon the Government to stop the sale of arms to Nigeria. He quotes John Chalmers,...

Sir: It would be a pity to disturb Mr Croft's drinking, fornicating or his appalling puns (Let- ters, 23 May), but participation, whether he likes it or not, is here to stay....

Sir: Would that Mr Jackson's perception equalled the vigour of his rhetoric (Letters 16 May). Despite the entrancement of his shrill sarcasm, let us, if I may trespass once more...

Sir: Your correspondents (Letters, 16 and 23 May) have successfully, I hope, enlightened Mr Ludovic Kennedy on communication. But one of them, Canon Blair (16 May), in an other-...

May) retire to the dizzy heights of Cambridge to discuss the validity of the appli- cation of Book 6 of Plato's Republic to present-day life, may I take this opportunity to...

Sir : I have generally found the SPECTATOR more fair-minded over the dispute between Rhodesia and Britain than most of the British press. I am therefore a little surprised by...

Sir: Should not the Arts Council advertise more the conditions under which it makes financial grants? Even when writing (as I did last month) to inquire as to what conditions...

Sir : Having followed, in some bewilderment, recent events at the Lse, I read with eagerness the letter from Messrs Bateson and Blackburn (16 May) hoping that this would clarify...

Sir: Re Mr Humphries's criticism of Oscar Wilde by Philippe Jullian (9 May), W. S. Gilbert could not have intended either the character of Bunthorne or Grosvenor as a parody of...

writes: "Mr Ashbrooke writes : 'This is the obverse of delicacy. . . .' Perhaps so. ." And perhaps if I may say so, not.' And perhaps if we may say so. so. May we point out to...

Sir: When I sat College Entrance in 1940, I committed myself to the statement that the Fool was the obverse of Lear. At the viva, the late Gavin Bone (who was subsequently my...

Sir: I read your leading article on 'this week's depressing trade figures' (16 May) just after returning from a visit to the us. Looking around shops and public places produced...

Sir: Mr Anthony Burgess's review of the Walter de la Mare anthology, Secret Laughter (16 May), seems an odd mixture of suggestio falsi, inaccuracy, haste and superficiality,...

Sir: You may consider it appropriate, at this juncture in our national affairs, to draw the attention of Mr Harold Wilson, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, to a...

Sir: While the engulfment of lives in the Nigeria-Biafra war is a big enough challenge to the imagination, it is more difficult to realise that some of the victims of the war...

Sir: John .WeIls's delightful parody of the idiotic waffling of colonial civil servants (Letters, 9 May) was right on target, pseudonym (Stanley,' a brilliant stroke that) and...

E.M.B. A number of successful dollar-earning pop singers are reported to be contemplating emi- grating to Switzerland to escape a provision in the current Finance Bill designed...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS There was still no news today of silver-haired, pipe-smoking Hrald Wylison, the veteran ad- venturer who is attempting the almost impos- sible feat of...

Across 1 Take parts for a comeback with suspenders, 0 upright commuters (5-7) 9 Trace the process of the law to athletic habit (5-4) 10 Of course, it's where to see a...

No. 555: Happily ever after Flashman, a new book by Mr George Mac- Donald Fraser, purports to recount the reminiscences of the notorious bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays after...

PHILIDOR Black 9 men 13 men P. ten Cate (fourth prize, Vida Rotaria Tourney, 1956). White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 440...