M any people believe that Sotheby's caters only for the rich. It is true that we sell many items which make recordl5tices (269 last season). It is true that we have sold the...

It is now nine weeks since the Thomson Organisation suspended publication of The Times and its three supplements, and the Sunday Times. It is probably true that the longer the...

Ferdinand Mount The fatigue is terrible. Steam rises, sweat pours from 'the government front bench as from a rugger changing-room. Weary bodies flop against one another; tired...

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it is David Frost arriving in a time capsule out of the Sixties to deal with our present crisis. The spectacle was preposterous. It seemed as if...

Auberon Waugh Tory cries that Mr Callaghan ought to have declared a State of Emergency may be ascribed to the ancient and honourable tradition of opponent-baiting or...

Roger Cooper Despite the weeks of suspense leading up to it, the Shah's departure from Iran seems to have done little to solve Iran's worsening chaos. The Shah's ghost lingers...

Richard West Salisbury You have to hand it to Ian Smith. Only fourteen years ago, he led a rebellion against the British crown to establish in Rhodesia a system of white...

Peter Nichols Mexico City The finest London drama critic to emerge after the war once opened his review of a brilliant if misguided performance of Othello by saying that those...

Mr Sidney Buxton, in one of his amusing papers on animals in the Animal World for February, says that dogs and horses are, as far as he knows, the only animals sensitive to...

Cecil Parrott I wonder how many Western tourists who put up at the Inter-Continental, Prague's one Western-style luxury hotel (where even the lift intones the strains of...

Christopher Walker Belfast By one of those coincidences beloved of the conspiracy theorists who have thrived so effortlessly on the Ulster crisis, two very different...

Nora Beloff Inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, Auberon Waugh describes me as 'silly', 'fatuous', 'pathetic', 'ludicrous' and guilty of 'basic intellectual...

Peter Ackroyd Prisons have, in a sense, survived by accident on the weary complicity between society and its outcasts. But, as I described in last week's article, the prison...

Colin Brewer Although the Victorian physician Sir William Osier remarked that the chief difference between man and the lower animals was the desire of the former to take...

Christopher Booker A few weeks ago, Patrick Marnham contributed an article to these columns entitled 'What Do Christians Believe?'. He poured robust scorn on the present...

Nicholas Davenport With the return of hold-ups on the Queen's highways as in the wicked old days one must expect before long the revival of duelling. This might present us with...

Lord Denning's distinction Sir: I do not know of Christine Verity's qualifications for writing about Lord Denning (27 January). I do know that, as a practising solicitor, I had...

Andrew Boyle The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom Vol. IV: Sound and Vision Asa Briggs (Oxford £25) Asa Briggs is, as always, a shrewd and dependable guide through...

Raymond Carr The Catalans Jan Read (Faber £7.95) Peripheral nationalisms have a triple root: a vision and interpretation of history that stands against that of the centralizing...

Christine Verity The Bar on Trial Ed. Robert Hazell (Quartet £1.95) Lawyers have not enjoyed a particularly attractive public image down the centuries, and rarely less so than...

Hans Keller Freewill and Responsibility Anthony Kenny (Routledge £4.50) My title, I claim, is better than the author's — for distinguished philosopher that he is, it is...

Benny Green The Best of 'Chums' Ed. Philip Warner (Cassell £7.50) In so far as it is a generation behind the times, popular fiction for boys is inevitably escapist. A glance at...

Francis King The Tales of - Henry James Vol. 11 Ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford £15.00) The problem that faces any editor of the complete edition of the 112 works of short fiction,...

John McEwen Samuel Palmer's visionary paintings of Shoreham in Kent in the 1820s have long been acclaimed as perhaps the most perfect pictorial symbol of England before its...

Peter Jenkins 1001 Nights (Shaftesbury) Da (Greenwich) Two or three drinks are in order before settling down to enjoy the entertainment on offer from the travelling French...

David Austin The retrospective exhibition of Saul Steinberg now showing at the Serpentine gallery is organised by the Whitney Museum, New York. Reproductions of all the work in...

Rodney Milnes The Magic Flute (Welsh National Opera, Mold) Virtue and necessity are judiciously balanced in this sober, clearly thoughtthrough new production by Goran...

Ted Whitehead The First Time (Gala Royal) The American Soldier (Electric) Damien Omen II (Leicester Square Theatre) It would be interesting to hear the reaction of a...

Richard Ingrams I switched on the latest of Alan Bennett's six plays The Old Crowd (LWT), having as usual missed the beginning, to find a group of well-known actors and...

Taki High-lifers and gamblers were in a state of deep shock last week. Uncharacteristically, it was neither a lack of good coke nor the closing of a nightclub that provoked...

Jeffrey Bernard While I suffered, took part in and eavesdropped a succession of painfully boring conversations this morning in Lambourn it occurred to me that the London...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft A month after Christmas and Hogmanay is soon enough to start thinking about drinking again: I mean thinking again rather than drinking again. Total...

No. 1050: Nobodaddy Christopher Matthew's recently published Diary of a Somebody invites comparison with George and Weedon Grossmith's saga of the Pooter family. Competitors...

of the doleful Innkeeper, bewails his subsequent banishment as followeth: Come, certain grief! Weep, every living thing! Let all my images henceforth be those Of drooping,...

David Levy In last week's Spectator Ray Keene touched on some of the problems of the FIDE title system and explained how the new regulations will set higher title norms. The...