BRITAIN'S SEAMEN'S STRIKE drifted along its third week. with a forecast that it could dam- age the balance of payments by anything up to £20 million a month; the court of...

Rhodesian officials in Salis- bury. and the negotiations to settle relations between Indonesia and Malaysia seemed all harmony and light. President Johnson said that, for...

N EXT week the foreign ministers of the NATO countries meet in Brussels largely to stress their new-found unity in the face of the erring French, and the ever- threatening...

Friday June 3 1966

A Leader in Search of a Party By ALAN WATKINS W ELL, no one can say that Mr Harold Wilson has not been warned. The dis- illusion in the parliamentary Labour party is, or ought...

At Harvard a computer machine has been installed by which through Operation thatch suitable boys and girls are paired of with each other. Its results are alleged not to be...

Is There a Future for the Independent Schools? By ANGUS MAUDE, MP W itaTEvett the Newsom Commission finally recommends (if anything), it seems clear that during the lifetime...

All the Way to the Unthinkables From MURRAY KEMPTON NEW YORK A MER1CANS can no more cease Vietnam than they can find to say about it. talking about anything new Mr Johnson...

June 2, 1866 . The Bavarian King, a lad over educated for his intellect, with a passion for music and mystical ideas, has been indulging himself in an escapade. He was missing...

The US Economy's Early Warning From DAVID WATT WASHINGTON This masterly self-portrait is not of course entirely spurious. Nor indeed is it all his own work. The...

re- member, spent blissfully with friends in the Scot- tish border country, I was reluctantly obliged to return to London on Tuesday morning. The plane was due to leave...

W HAT 011 earth is the Government playing at over the seamen's strike? Take the de- cision to appoint a court of inquiry into the dis- pute. In the first place, it seems...

informed their readers on Saturday, 'has written to Mr Nigel Lawson, editor of the SPECTATOR, to apologise for his slip of the tongue in answering a question from Mr Ian Gilmour...

Wilson's favourite lawyer. He is also a newly appointed trustee of the Observer and has con- siderable experience of the law of libel. His quali- fications for speaking in last...

he has not been called in now—and the Government has even gone so far as to give an assurance that he will never be called in. The Prices and In- comes Board, for all Mr Brown's...

The Power Game By JOHN WELLS • T HE only publicity a good newspaper needs is provided by the paper itself. So, at least, Sir William Haley put it to Kenneth Harris in a recent...

MARK HEATHCOAT AMORY I N August 1962, three months before the inde- pendence of Uganda, I went to Mungo Palace at Kampala to spend a year as tutor to the seven- year-old son of...

By ALAN BRIEN WALKING home from Tap- low station to my week- end cottage on the Thames towpath the other evening, I suddenly realised that there is still an awful lot of Nature...

Paper Hospitals By JOHN ROWAN WILSON O NE of the striking things about the National Health Service is that the alarmists have been almost always proved right. The reason for...

tell me if they intend to take Dr Wilson's advice and instruct their daughters in the mysteries of hepy petting. If so, could they let me know what anatomical terms they intend...

calling David Steel, MP for the Borders constituency, parochial and illiberal if he fails to re- introduce the lapsed Homosexual Bill ('Spectator's Notebook,' May 20). This is...

in sexual intercourse, it is normally 'a matter of the park at night, the back seat of a car, a hurried scramble in the front room with Mum and Dad snoring upstairs,' and...

E.P5 VC) 711.1 ilrf02 From: The Rev C. G. Wilson, Dr W. B. Hep- burn, Alec Craig. Dorothy Usher, Dr Bryan Wilson. J. H. Dodson, Arthur Pottersman, S. W. Alexander, Pat Sloan,...

found the 'ballyhoo' and 'gimmickry' in the presentation of the Franks Report (Letters, May 27). He must remember that, whatever the public interest, this was an internal...

necessary to adopt unusual measures to make 'presentation of the report abso- lutely straightforward.' Is it any wonder that there is such widespread distrust of 'public...

Sta,-Mr Wilfred Beckerman asks: 'Can Britain's shipping survive?' Perhaps the right question to ask might be 'Can Britain survive without her shipping?' It is not, I think,...

SIR. -1 am the biographer of the American critic, James Gibbons Huneker (1857-1921), whose letters 1 am now collecting for an edition. He corresponded, I believe. with a number...

Sia.My controversy with Mr Szamuely is about Ghana today, not about what I wrote about the USSR in the 1930s. However, by all means let readers look up library copies of Soviet...

Sta,-A small point, but since it happened with Stuart Hood the other week, and with Leslie Adrian last week and with myself a few weeks ago in Another Place (printer's error,...

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Derivate. 10 Pounce. 12 Trier. 13 Riot squad. 14 Antimetabole. 18 Conversation. 21 Moonstone. 23 Irate. 24 Elijah. 25 Ridicule. 26 Simnel. 27 Cyrenian. DOWN.-1 Sedate. 2 Heroic....

The Colour War By STUART . HOOD N Err month in Oslo they are going to dis- cuss colour television systems. They? The CCIR, or International Radio Consultative Conii- mittee,...

Tender Traps R EADERS of Saul Bellow's first novels—the ones he wrote just after the war before assuming the monologuist manner of Augie March and Herzog—should know just what...

Pretty Things R um start at Glyndebourne. The Dido and ,Aeneas of Purcell and Nahum Tate, so revered a piece that any performance of it is rather like going to church, was...

Tunnels of Love HE number of large works by Hepworth in I her current show at Gimpel Fits and the nature of this sculpture turn a medium-sized gallery into a tunnel of love:...

Prison Island Cul - de - Sac. (Cameo- Poly, `X' certificate.)—The Moving Target. (Odeon, Leicester Square, `A' certificate.) T HERE was seldom such a shooting star as Roman...

BLACK (3 men) No. 385 J. MORAVEC (Casopis Ceskych Sachistu, 5909) WHITE to play and mate in three moves; solution next week. Solution to No. 284 B 'Flarin : K— a!, threat g) Kt...

By C. B. COX ANDALL JARRELL said that the contemporary D L poet has a peculiar relationship with his public: it is unaware of his existence. Even among students, sad to say,,...

‘. . FOR me at any rate,' writes Lord David Cecil in his introduction to the new World's Classics edition, '[Max Beerbohm's] Seven Men and Two Others is the finest expression of...

The Smoke Screen of Jutland. By John Irving. (William Kimber, 50s.) THE fascination of Jutland continues to call forth an extraordinary number of books. Not long ago Geoffrey...

Doll, by Ed McBain (Hamish Hamilton, 16s.). If a new Ed McBain doesn't come your way, you ask for it, because otherwise you know you will be missing a thriller with a special...

Head, 18s.). Starts off in a `Very promising way, in the advertising world ,jf little problems and big solutions. Soon our herd, a part - time agent, is diverted to an...

'ON the 12th of June the Western hordes entered Russia and war broke out That is to say, an event took place in diametrical opposition to all laws human and divine.' Tolstoy's...

15s.). A beautifully contrived thriller, with one mystery within another. The Youthful Tossa and Dominic, well-rounded, whole characters, grip the reader's attention as they...

The Letters of C. S. Lewis. Edited by W. M. Lewis. (Bles, 30s.) IN January 1917 C. S. Lewis wrote to his brother, 'Oxford is absolutely topping, and I am awfully bucked with...

Miss Macintosh, My Darling. By Marguerite Young. (Peter Owen, 63s.) Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx. By Piers Paul Read. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 21s.) No two approaches to the...

A candle-end, and two odd high-heeled shoes. (Fetish for candlelight worship?) Near them a crate Of half-drunk wine that must have been filched. I had run The tramp's-earth to...

In Ages Past By ELAINE MOSS E VERY age has its architecture, its literature, its music—and its children. Nash, Jane Austen and Beethoven are still in a sense with us, but the...

CHILDREN and young persons, nowadays, have a whale of a lot done for their enlightenment, one way and another. No longer are the golden apples hung at any height, for those to...

outstanding children's book has been awarded to the Rev. Philip Turner for The Grange at ugh Force (O.U.P., 16s.), a book for older boys which breaks new ground, blazing, one...

rather more detailed (ten to thirteen). No flowers or bees, but there is an interesting account of the courtship and mating habits of birds and fish before he gets down (perhaps...

on milk, and• anything else he can steal, but when they return to the city there is an added hazard : Tab the cat. This becomes such an anxiety that eventually they take -Ring-...

way, appehr in Battle 1066, by Brigadier C. N. Barclay (Dent, 21s.), and The Field of Selllac, by Allen Vanbrugh (Dobson, 15s.). Brigadier Barclay's serious study is the work of...

The Rowboat War, by Fred Swayze (Macmillan, I3s. 6d.). In 1812, Britain and America came to blows over the control of the Great Lakes. Mr Swayze, a Canadian, has gathered facts...

new books in Collins's 'Panorama' series. Seal Bay, by Geoffrey Dutton and Dean Hay (12s. 6d.), tells, in simple text and large photo- graphs, how two small boys on an island...

to contend with. The Question and Answer Book of Space, by Ruth A. Sonneborn (Odhams, 10s. 6d.), is a profusely illustrated account, in simple terms (eight to eleven), of what...

IN a country where weather is a constant topic of conversation, the majority of people are woefully ignorant of its causes. This, however, does not deter the 'How and Why...

Stuart Legg (Hart-Davis, 30s.), is made of quotations from contemporary records—diaries, dispatches, letters. Mr Stuart Legg is an editor of documentary films, and in this...

Timothy John and Mr Murphy (Collins, 10s. 6c1.), and Walter Macken's Island of the Great Yellow Ox (Mac- millan, 16s.), a story of Druid treasure and mysterious yachts. This...

set in Corsica and, as the book's title suggests, it is concerned with the passionate griefs, quarrels and jealousies that seem to happen only in Corsica or Sicily. These are...

all these levels, though most contain at least a hint of the fabulous. Robert Nye's book of short stories, March Has Horse's Ear (Faber, 15s.), makes great play, and fun, with...

than most of the others under discussion. Margaret Storey's The Smallest Doll (Faber, 12s. 6d.), is concerned with a Sunday School play; an element of fantasy is introduced,...

6d.) deals with a painful subject subtly and sometimes profoundly. It is also a brave story, since it concerns the first blind and deaf child to 'talk' and 'hear.' Laura is the...

Raymond Abrashkin (Macdonald, 13s. 6d.), is much more pedestrian, though it uses exciting material, such as all-wise professors and the strange fish to be found in the depths of...

STORIES for children—at least all successful and lasting ones—nearly always work on several levels. There is, firstly, the level of pure narra- tive—accurate and usually...

wizard who has the immediacy and also that swiftness in appearing and vanishing which appeal so much to the child's timeless sense of reality. Stumpf, the wizard in question,...

Too many children must still identify books too closely with classroom curricula. Six months' hard reading would be the stiffest of sentences. But to these, and to others who...

clansmen,' was a major Victorian scandal. A Pistol in Greenyards, by Mollie Hunter (Evans, 16s.), is angry rather than glum, a tale of greed and monstrous officialdom never...

SF diluted—or strengthened —with Morality Tale. A boy drops from another planet knowing no human speech or customs, but able to communicate with animals and read the minds of...

Island of the Blue Dolphins. By Scott O'Dell. (Puffin, 3s. 6d.) The Green Bronze Mirror. By Lynne Ellison. (Blackie, 12s. 6d.) Papa Pellerin's Daughter. By Maria Gripe....

and fat,' and he lives alone in a gum-tree penthouse when two young bears, to his amazement and later consternation, announce that they have come to stay. The illustrations have...

Windus, 12s. &I.), is a story set in Thailand, in which a little monk, by his gentle- ness and kindness to animals, helps a fierce tiger and saves his village from danger. The...

the lion-hearted mouse, in Anatole and the Poodle, by Eve Titus, illustrated by Paul Galdone (Bodley Head, 10s. 6d.). Anatole copes fearlessly with Poodlenappers, flies from...

PicrutE books for young children are often so lavishly illustrated that one is tempted to buy them for their eye - appeal alone, but if they are to be of more than passing...

The Emperor's New Clothes, retold by Elizabeth and Gerald Rose (Faber, 15s.). The emperor in all his vanity is a true emperor of fairy-tales, while the swindlers are twentieth...

quality for the very young should bear in mind the Puffin slogan, 'There is Nuffin' Like a Puffin.' Ponder and William, by Barbara Softly (Penguin, 3s. 6d.), is a new Young...

Machines for Cooking In By LESLIE ADRIAN It is fun-of-the-fair side-shows such as this that save the Heal's exhibition from the 'ideal home' sterility that infects most...

Computers After Cousins By JOHN BULL Mite problems facing the computer industry I look unnervingly like those with which the aircraft industry has battled for the past seven...

By CUSTOS T HE steady rise in share prices since the budget finally petered out on the day before the Whit- sun holiday. En route investors shugged off an alarming break on...

By LORD EGREMONT In the London Tinier recently appeared the following report : A replica has just been made of 'The Em- peror.' one of the proudest possessions of the...

Parliamentary Reform: A Special Survey One year's subscription to the 'Spectator': £3 I 5s. (including postage) in the United Kingdom and Eire. By surface mail to any other...