R. CHURCHILL'S resounding speech on Wednesday, in the Commons debate on devaluation, at one blow moved the whole issue from the economic to the political plane. It cannot be...

The Chinese have very sensibly sought to improve their equivocal position at the United Nations by taking the offensive. They accuse Russia of violating the Sino-Russian Treaty...

The general progress in Germany has received two set-backs this week, the fault in neither case being primarily the Germans' own. In Berlin the possibility of a new crisis has...

The United Nations Kashmir Commission has now abandoned its efforts to mediate between India and Pakistan and has gone into retirement at Geneva for the purpose of writing its...

The present signs arc that the sudden bout of political activity in France which has been in progress since the pound was devalued will not come to an immediate climax in a...

The progress of the dispute between the Cominform and Marshal Tito has fully demonstrated the truth that in Communist quarrels there are no half-measures. The Yugoslav protest,...

T . HE Russians have, to the best of everyone's knowledge and belief, an atomic bomb ; M. Vyshinsky has made pro- posals for the destruction of all existing atomic bombs,...

to the word that has caused so much controversy about a recent B.B.C. broadcast. There is no need to make any bones about it. The word was bugger. It is a beastly word. It is...

1 T is remarkable how closely politics and piety can sometimes be associated. Never, I imagine, in this Parliament has the attendance at prayers in the House of Commons been...

beyond the corner where they happened. There was a meeting, for example, addressed by Mr. Anthony Eden in Anglesey, Lady Megan Lloyd George's constituency, on behalf of Lady...

followed, it was the same thing, only more so. The Opposition leader was at the top of hiz form and delivered one of those speeches that only he can make. The characteristic...

An advertiser in Country Life is to be congratulated on his skill in avoiding the common misuse of the tricky word " unique " (which cannot be " more " or most "). Having a...

Lord Beveridge has come back from a short visit to Germany convinced that the Germans should follow our example and build new towns. That is only part of a larger conviction,...

Stafford Cripps's alleged—I emphasise the adjective—untruthfulness. It began with a Manchester Guardian leader headed " Necessary Untruthful- ness," arguing that it was the...

By SIR HENRY DALE, O.M.• T HE week ending September 24th was one of explosive revelations. The Chancellor's disclosure of the decision to devalue the pound was only a few days...

By ROBERT WAITHMAN Washington, September 24th N OTHING about the economic talks in Washington so puzzled the watching world as the cheerfulness with which Sir Stafford Cripps...

13) N. K. BOOT T HIS week, for many thousands of Londoners between the ages of sixteen and a hundred, term starts. Every day last week, which was enrolment week, patient...

THE first stone of the great City Prison at Holloway was laid by the Lord Mayor on Wednesday afternoon ; many members of the Court of Aldermen and Common Council, with most of...

By RAWLE KNOX T HE lights are going out all over Gala Land ; the Ghost Trains haunt their platforms in desolate immobility and there are no more Honeymoon Rides for yet another...

university or university college in Britain, and may be on any subject. Articles, which need not be typewritten, should be approximately 1,400 words in length.

The Craft of Auto-Stopping By GERDA L. COHEN (Girton College, Cambridge) W E were two of the unemployed intelligentsia—tough, unprincipled and feminine. The students at the...

By HAROLD NICOLSON I AM not attracted by people who dislike the B.B.C. There is the type of person who considers it distinguished to remain immune to a form of entertainment or...

THJ THEATRE I MUST confess to being a bit behind the times as far as le cas Piddington is concerned. I have never heard the Piddingtons broad- cast, and though I am vaguely...

SADLER'S WELLS opened their autumn season with a performance of Simone Boccanegra on Monday and a ballet programme which included the new Sea Change on Tuesday. The casting of...

Marius." (Curzon.)—"Liebelei." (Everyman on Monday.)- •• The Chiltern Hundreds." (Odeon, Marble Arch.) Marius is, so to speak, the first volume of a trilogy written for the...

James Pryde Memorial Exhibition. (Tate Gallery.) PRYDE exhibited little in his lifetime, and this comprehensive collec- tion arranged by the Arts Council gives the first...

With Medea in Professor Gilbert Murray's translation there is no innovation ; and it was World Theatre's business only to tread firmly and gracefully on a well-beaten path. The...

Dick Barton returns this week—lean, bronzed and tremendously muscular (I make no doubt) after his summer vacation. I expect the usual wails from educationists. They forget the...

IT was gallant of Mr. Patric Dickinson and the Third Programme to tackle the Pseudolus of Plautus. It would be idle of me to pretend that, in a survey of the comic theatre down...

Protestants in Eire Rawle Knox is one of those very rare birds among Eireans, whether they be Protestants or Roman Catholics—a man who can write about Ulster Unionists with...

SIR, —My attention has just been called to a note in your Spectator's Notebook of September 16th, 1949, which seems to me to constitute so lamentable a sign of the times as to...

says: " Strasbourg has heard that Sir Ronald Ross was a Kaiser's man in 1914 and that Mr. de Valera was a Hitler's man in 1945 ; that part of the island is forcibly occupied by...

Eire in the Spectator of September 23rd. The lady who remarked on the strange goings-on at the Meath Hospital Board election recently was not, in fact, a " defeated Protestant "...

Sta,—Mr. Harold Nicolson, in the concluding paragraph of Marginal Comment in the Spectator of September 23rd, seems to lose taste both for his anonymous correspondent and for "...

Set,—Your opening annotations are usually, as far as one can judge, so fair and factual that I feel I must mention a failing in this respect in your comment on the Health...

of the Health Service reminds one of the patient who was suffering from asthma, angina pectoris and general paralysis of the insane, but otherwise was in perfect health....

SIR,—Accordin g to Mr. Mayer in the Spectator of September 16th, "Charles Pickthorn infers that the National Union of Students was un-. aware, beforehand, of the political...

Sts,—Reading the editorial note on The Two Chinas in the Spectator of September 23rd, I am worried by the suggestion—may I call it the bland suggestion ?—that we may find...

ional Youth in the Spectator of September 9th. I, too, was one of the ten thousand young people in Budapest, but, no doubt because I am finable to boast of eyes as " reactionary...

SIR, —Mr. Hussey says: " In St. John xx. 23 we read Our Lord's words to the eleven Apostles." St. John does not use the word "Apostles," but "Disciples" (Mathetae), a more...

SIR,— Reading C. H. Lewis's article on time-tables I feel that I can console him and others, for his experience in time-table construction could have been even worse. Until a...

SIR, —In the autumn of last year I asked a dressmaker, who works hard in a " one-woman " business, if she had had the holiday of which she looked in need. Her reply was that now...

Six,—May I, as a humble undergraduate, be permitted to express strong disagreement with Janus's revised definition of a university " don " ? There is a certain prestige and...

SIR, —In your issue of August 12th Strix referred to a matter connected with the sale of some of his pigs weighed in " score," and I have just read news in another publication...

offer a footnote to your review of Mrs. Cole's symposium on pcatrice and Sidney Webb. It comes from the campaign conducted by the Webbs forty-odd years ago to expound the...

SUBSCRIPTION RATES. Ordinary Edition by post to any part of the world. 52 weeks world-wide distribution by Air " All Up " service to all countries in Europe (except Poland)....

verified by successive trials—comes from a friend with much " corroborative detail." A spaniel, with some of whose previous feats I am familiar, was sent every day to fetch the...

SIR, —Your contributor, Mr. Frank Sykes, in his arresting article, Pills for Groundnuts, calls attention to fertiliser experiments in the introduction of a superphosphate pellet...

families arc small and few, in some large and many. This has been shown in surprising detail in certain enquiries into the ways of migrant wild duck. We have, I think, just...

In the most thoughtful book I have read for years (Road to Survival) occurs a passage that should be well considered by our present-day theorists, and the American author...

The year begins for farmer and gardener not in the winter, or as Ovid desired in the spring, but in autumn (which, of course, is a sort of spring, a season of germination and...

SIR,—You say, in commenting on the Hungarian " treason " trials, " How the confessions are extracted is a matter of speculation, and there it must be left." But is that so ?...

The problem why rain is obviously more effective than any watering of garden plants seems to have exercised the wonder of a great many persons. The most plausible of the...

SIR,—Has Lord Davidson's conduct of the Ashridgc affair the approval of Conservative headquarters, and, if so, have the said authorities realised what a serious loss of votes...

A Living Force THE sleep of one of America's best - known poets was troubled by "The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation." Professor...

Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939. Edited by E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler, assisted by Margaret Lambert. Third Series, Vol. 11, 1938. (Stationery Office. 21s.)...

The Art of T. S. Eliot. By Helen Gardner. (Cresset Press. 12s. 6d.) THOSE of us who read Miss Gardner's first illuminating essay on three of the Quartets in the New Writing and...

A Victorian Romantic : Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By Oswald Doughty. (Muller. 25s.) THOSE who examine the Victorians—and how numerous they have become —seem frequently to adopt a...

" ALL fault-finding attacks on the social order have a negative bias, and the negative is nothing. If I call bad what is bad, what is the great gain? But if I call bad what is...

Walter de la Mare. A Study of his Poetry. By Henry Charles Duflin. (Sidgwick and Jackson. 8s. 6d.) HAVING enjoyed this critic's recent essay on Wordsworth, I opened his new book...

An Outspoken Soldier : His Views and Memoirs. By Lieut-General Sir Giffard Martel. (Sifton Praed. 21s.) GENERAL MARTEL has been associated with tank warfare since its inception...

Masterpieces of Greek Coinage. By Charles Seltman. (Bruno Cassirer. 21s.) MR. SzurmArt, who is one of the outstanding experts in this country on ancient numismatics, has here...

Storm and Echo. By Frederic Prokosch. (Faber. 10s. 6d.) The Arabian Bird. By Constantine FitzGibbon. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.) Family Trouble. By William McFee. (Faber. 10s. 6d.)...

James Pryde. By Derck Hudson. (Constable. 21s.) WHEN Mr. Derek Hudson contends that Pryde was the only twentieth-century painter who could have held his own in the com- pany of...

Time of Hope. By C. P. Snow. (Faber. 12s. 6d.) OF the imposing edifice of some ten or more novels designed to cover e very field and aspect of contemporary English life, Time...

THERE have been complaints lately from critics and publishers that children's books do not get proper reviews ; that if they arc mentioned at all no aesthetic standards are...

J. Rose. (Cambridge University Press. 2 Vols. £7 7s.) ios, the authors of this work tell us, never produced a writer of h e first rank, unless of course we should concede its...

MESSRS. HAMISH HAMILTON'S " Novel Library " has lately been giving me, and I hope many others, a great deal of pleasure. The publishers have so far concentrated primarily on the...

THERE is an inexhaustible fascination, especially for writers outside the historical academies, about the period of English history that stretches from the end of the Civil War...

Malta: An Account and an Appreciation. By Sir Harry Luke (Harrap. 15s.) THE former Lieutenant-Governor of Malta (193o-38) throughout his thirty-five years in the Colonial...

THE puzzle of the German national character has not ceased to pesturb Europe ; in Day After Day, which is a meticulously kept diary of three years of internment in German hands...

, e,.1 5 T ea 1,c. R k milk AIN., , lc R A e. '$ E 0 0 L E od a N R II 0 i. i E 2 1111 0 D EL ,......,; 4ti N. QET ..:.". 1 111.11.! , . 3 1 N mi D N. E N 0 ',.. L 1 0 a: A...

Book token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender. of the firs: correct j, n of this week's crossword to he opened after noon on Tuesday week, thr.- ler 11th. Envelopes...

By CUSTOS Ktiow , Dm its Cripps, the City has not been completely taken by surprise by the announcement of an increased Pro fi ts Tax which put a sting into the tail of the...

PERHAPS the most important book, at least from a historian's point of view, to be published this autumn will be the new volume of the Dictionary of National Biography,...