However corruption may be defined, it involves change. It is obvious that the published word can affect, which is to say change, behaviour : in their different ways the Bible...

It is remarkable how George Brown, who, when he was Foreign Secretary, was regarded by Hugh Cudlipp and his Daily Mirror boyos as a load of old rubbish, is now treated seriously...

Incidentally, all those pro-Market warriors Who are currently infatuated with the nobility of Roy Jenkins and his antiWilson stance could do worse than bear in mind that Harold...

Before I am finally done with the Market, or, rather, before the autumn crunch, I must make a final observation which, I hope, will not go unregarded by Willie Whitelaw, Francis...

I dropped into the House of Commons on Tuesday to see and hear the Prime Minister dealing with his questions. Very cool and assured he looked, too, leaning against the dispatch...

1 find very puzzling a statement such as that made by Mr Mark Carlisle, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Office, that the present "prison population" on May 31 was...

The forcing down of the BOAC VC-10 by the Libyan authorities; the forced removal from that plane of Major Hamadallah and of Lt.-Col el-Nur; the subsequent handing over of these...

Brian Inglis, former editor of The Spectator, writes to me from Ireland, and about Ireland and our recent leading articles, thus: It is a remarkable fact' — Lucas, biographer of...

I greatly enjoyed seeing the daddy of the marketeers, Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing the European case on television. Mosely is a formidable fellow, disarming, intelligent, and for...

Teddy Tay or, who has just resigned from the government was always the odd man out in the Scottish Office. He was originally picked to hold the education and health brief for...

Why I have resigned EDWARD TAYLOR MP As a staunch teetotaller I found specially attractive the advice of an aged MP when I arrived at the Commons in 1964: 'Office in the...

Off the record BERNARD DIXON Your medical history, stored away in your doctor's filing cabinet, is totally confidential and its contents cannot be passed on to inquirers. At...

Bank account DENNIS HACKETT So Mr Wilson decided to tell Terence Lancaster what he declined to tell David Dimbleby, which just goes to show that it's not what you're asked but...

Elegy written in St. Peter's churchyard Burnham, Sunday, August 28, 1737 PETER WATSON-SMYTH ON July 30, 1771, Thomas Gray died at the age of fifty-four, leaving behind a...

HERE rests his head upon the lap of Earth A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown, Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own. Large was...

It is an astonishing monument, of its kind, and surely unique in its kind. A Prime Minister, a year after losing office, has published in eight hundred pages, at over five...

Mr Harold Wilson dedicates this book "To the hundreds of thousands of members of the Labour Party whose efforts and idealism created the Government of 1964-1970 and who, in dark...

Alienation Richard Schacht (Allen and Unwin £3.50) No one who could publish a book under the plain title Alienation could be altogether immune to the vulgar importunities of...

Who Cares Nicolas Stacey (Blond £2.50) The dust-jacket of this book shows the author standing in front of the cranes of East London dockland. He is wearing the modern...

Psychotherapy East and West Alan W. Watts (Cape £ 1 . 6 O) This book has taken ten years to reach this country since it first appeared in the United States as a Pantheon book...

The Multinationals Christopher Tugendhat (Eyre and Spottiswoode £3.25) Any body who had the pleasure of reading Mr Tugendhat in the Financial Times will remember that he is a...

Running Away David Pryce-Jones (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.00) Time was, we all used to think of young Jones as quite a radical. Well if not a radical, at least one of those...

Readers of The Spectator can bind their copies week by week in a special binding case, with stiff dark blue covers and glit-lettered spine, designed to hold twenty-six issues....

Barbara Hepworth 1960 - 1969 edited by Alan Bowness (Lund Humphries £7.00) Between 1960 and 1970, Barbara Hepworth produced 227 works of sculpture — almost as many as in the...

Besides the three or four hundred publishers who appear in The Writers' and Artists' Year Book, there are getting on for three thousand more who will publish a book in the...

Immaculate conceptualists EVAN ANTHONY I suppose if you must patronize your readers, a little bullying may be as good a way as any of keeping them in their place, so long as...

Wiener schnitzer KENNETH HURREN Before last week all I knew about Robert Sherwood's play, Reunion in Vienna, was a story Alexander Woo11cott used to tell about a scene in...

Urn burials CHRISTOPHER HUDSOf On A Clear Do You Can See Foret (' ' Dominion) sounds like meaningless drivel. But that won't turn everyone away from seeing it, so I had better...

Ballet imperial ROBIN YOUNG Anastasia is the Royal Opera House's first new full-length ballet for six years, and the first by Kenneth MacMillan for the same length of time. It...

Andy Warhol got into town this week to catch the final rehearsals of his play, Pork (which opens at the Roundhouse with Oh! Calcutta! prices — £2.50 a seat — on Monday), but his...

ART Hayward Gallery: as well as the Bridget Riley retrospective (reviewed on page 183), there is an exhibition of ,,Piscator theatre designs. Tate Gallery: the current special...

Sir : Mr Clive Jenkins's article on the unions and the EEC once again reveals the primitive superstitions which cloud the minds of our militant union bosses. When unionists in...

Sir: In total agreement with John Martin (July 24) who asks in his letter (Constitutional position of the Queen) What majority?, I should like to go further and ask What...

It is unfortunate that a Government that is trying so hard to raise the standard of industrial relations in the U.K. should be so inept in its handling of its own prospective...

Sir: I think Professor Maclaren (July 24) has misunderstood my position on abortion. I have never said that gynaecologists should be compelled to carry out abortions against...

Sir: Auberon Waugh's recent effort (July 17) in your columns can scarcely pass without an exclamation of astonishment. Particularly striking was the way that it led from a...

Sir: Plenty of people have died for their beliefs. It is not so common to find people who died for their assertion that an alleged fact of history was historical. It is true, as...

Sir: I regret that a misunderstanding may have developed as a result of the title that you gave my article in The Spectator of July 10, viz: "The worst university in the world:...

Sir: Norman Fowler says of the man in the Clapham pub: "Nobody knows what he wants." But it isn't what he wants, it's what he would want if it were there for him. After all,...

Sir: Mr Nicholas Davenport's articles on finance are among the most enjoyable pieces in your paper. He knows his subject to perfection and insists on calling things by their...

Sir: One wonders how The Spectator saw fit to give a prize to the story 'The Shortest way with Trespassers' July 17. The obscure and turgid wording conceals a host of delusions...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Criticism of Mr Barber's reflationary minibudget has been on the whole conventional, carping and crapulent. "Too much, too late! " was a common cry. Another...

Failing by a mere nose to prove the great wisdom of backing Stintino for a place rather than laying the odds on Mill Reef, finds me at Goodwood and half-way to extinction. All...

You may not be interested, but I have suffered since last week from a condition relieved only by opium and chalk. It was probably something I ate, though a diminutive...

The Food Education .Society's name implies that it is, gastronomically, a Good Thing. Joy Barnett, who died at the end of last year while its chairman, initiated and supervised...

BENNY GREEN The other day, while visiting a sick friend in University College Hospital, I happened to pass what looks like an old bomb-site but which is in fact a most...

PETER QUINCE Some friends of mine are rescuing and replanting an eighteenth century garden, With agreeable historic associations, which recent generations have allowed to fail...

I've always been somewhat sceptical of the magic of the Caribbean. An overplayed picture of swaying palms, rum punch, and oh-so-happy honeymooners jogging hand in hand along an...

The trials of Oz, continued TONY PALMER More than E100,000 and 51 weeks after the Friends of Oz had marched bravely from Lincoln's Inn Fields to Smithfield Meat Market, the...