A very serious accident occurred in a Soviet nuclear power station at Chernobyl, north of Kiev. Only after increased radioactivity had been detected over a thousand miles away,...

on Wednes- day was presented with the Wincott Foundation Award for financial journal- ism. He is the only journalist to have won the award twice.

as Soviet commenta- - that probably the worst nuclear accident in history has occurred in the Soviet Union. Without the control of Parliament or public opinion, the Soviet Union...

OFFICIALLY A PRE—EMBRYO L ast week the body set up by the medical profession to lend respectability to experiments on human embryos issued its first report. This document...

The Well Woman and the Well Doctor FERDINAND MOUNT Hitherto the National Health Service has remained splendidly aloof from all this. Doctors have been taught, rather like AA...

0th Liberal candidates in the by- elections, Mr Christopher Walmsley at West Derbyshire and Mrs Elizabeth Shields at Ryedale, are worthy persons. The Conservatives in the...

On the perils of becoming an editor AUBERON WAUGH I f it is true, as Napoleon remarked, that every private soldier carries a field- marshal's baton in his knapsack, I suppose...

Hugh Montgomery -Massingberd anatomises the new class structure of the Conservative Party and puts the current collection of Tory MPs in their places CONTEMPLATING recent...

Timothy Garton Ash on the great dilemma of choosing between America and Europe THE American bombs dropped on Tripoli have garishly illuminated a national dilem- ma. Our...

Another town in Galicia, Lisko, has been burnt down, and three large vil- lages, one almost a town, have shared the same fate. It is no longer doubted that incendiarism is at...

Charles Glass returns to the centre of Israeli-Palestinian conflict Damascus THE seven-year-old girl lay half-asleep, her head resting on the lap of an older woman, a friend...

in Fleet Street's silence over the King's romance ON 27 October 1936 at the Ipswich Assizes Mrs Wallis Simpson was granted a decree nisi by Mr Justice Hawke on grounds of...

Richard West returns to a constituency whose last by-election he reported in 1962 Matlock BEFORE coming to see the West Der- byshire by-election, I fished out an article I had...

the grave mistake of omitting the last three lines of the English translation he supplied to his Gaelic poem, printed on page 26 of last week's Scottish Special Issue. Instead...

the new proprietors to help replace a bad old union IN THE bad old days of Fleet Street, which happily I can now refer to in the past tense, one of the main reasons why the...

LATE for a City date, I bounced into a taxi — and was startled to find that it offered, not only a telephone, but a list of excuses for being late. Pick up our telephone...

THE seven-cornered drafting committee in a Tokyo back room will by now have prepared the communiqué. All that re- moms is for the seven heads of state to arrive, have their...

When the Barchester Building Society faces the West Indies FILD ES CHRISTOPHER I wonder who will be first to go bust, lending money on mortgages. They have the look of an...

NOW, for my next trick — how to start making the Common Agricultural Policy pay for itself, or at least to stop our taxpayers having to pay quite so much for it. Milk quotas,...

Life between the netsukes and the glaciers JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE N obody would dream of suggesting that if Colonel Gaddafi were to go on the rampage this weekend the Japanese...

in Libya (19 April) was shameful. Christopher Hitchens's pre- dictably snide comments about the La Belle discotheque in Berlin were in typical- ly bad taste. (There was no...

the moneyed American relatives of Churchill, Macmillan, Hailsham, Channon and Hilary Benn that makes your paper sound anti-American. Pace Alan Watkins (Diary, 26 April), it can...

Sir: In rejecting Edmund lronside as non- Shakespearean because it lacks poetry, Dr Rowse (26 April) seem to have forgotten his own assessment of an 11-line sample I sent him in...

Sir: The problem is that I am rather addicted to A. Waugh's column. I even agree with it now and then. Yet there is the odd time when the old boy nods. On 26 April he wrote that...

Sir: How odd that Ferdinand Mount (Poli- tics, 19 April) should compare Napier's expedition to Magdala in 1867 with the recent US air-raid on Libya. Odder still that he should...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY! Please enter a subscription to The Spectator I enclose my cheque for f (Equivalent SUS & Eurocheques accepted) RATES: 12 Months 6 Months UK/Eire 0 £41.00 0...

K ingsley Amis once asked a fellow- Oxonian 'a terrible question': 'What has Oxford taught you that Cambridge couldn't?' The answer was, 'Not to be afraid of the obvious' — apt...

Peter Quennell THE LAMBERTS: GEORGE, CONSTANT AND KIT by Andrew Motion Chatto & Windus, .£13.95 G eorge Washington Lambert, son of an American engineer, was born in 1873,...

Humphrey Carpenter DEAR SHADOWS: PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY by John Wain John Murray, .f10.95 S omebody called Charles Williams, who used to write thrillers about God and the...

Alastair Forbes THE BERLIN DIARIES, 19 40-1945, OF MARIE `MISSIE' VASSILTCHIKOV edited by Georgi Vassiltchikov Chatto & Windus, £12.95 W hen at Christmastime, completely bowled...

Anthony Blond ISLAM AND THE DESTINY OF MAN by Gai Eaton George Allen & UnwinIThe Islamic Texts Society, £12.95 I f all disputes, be they marital or martial, are rooted in...

Brian Goodwin MEMOIRS OF A THINKING RADISH by Peter Medawar OUP, £12.50 S . ir Peter Medawar appears to be pre- eminently the stuff of which the English Establishment is...

Patrick Swinden LIVE FLESH by Ruth Rendell Hutchinson, £9.95 A DARK-ADAPTED EYE by Barbara Vine Viking, £9.95 R uth Rendell must be one of the most prolific, as well as the...

Who has presence if compared With a beech tree he has spared? Some have absence which can be Like the cut trunk of a tree. Alan Dixon

J. Enoch Powell W th the springy step of a young Fellow I was crossing the lawns of Great Court, Trinity, on the sunny morning of May Day 1936, when I noticed the college flag...

sk any averagely educated English A person which was the greatest period in this country's drama and the automatic response will nearly always be that it was the drama of the...

Paintings and Drawings of the Barbizon School (Hazlitt, Gooden and Fox until 16 May) Grass roots David Wakefield P aintings of the Barbizon school (so- called because a...

Doctor Faust (Coliseum) A key work Rodney Milnes M uch have I travelled in the realms of opera, but can remember few experiences more shattering than, stoutly silent upon a...

Rampant tulipophobia Ursula Buchan T here is a disease, unfortunately conta- gious and spreading rapidly, which the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food has not, as...

Enoch wept Noel Malcolm R adio 4's Six Men (Sundays, 9.30 p.m.) is the sort of programme that ought to be more interesting than it turns out to be. It's a counterpart to the...

Unseen splendours Alexander Chancellor T his is a moment of deep embarrass- ment for this column (I have never under- stood why columnists like to describe themselves as 'this...

Ups and downs Taki New York Although Rupert Murdoch, the Abe Lincoln of the British press chain g angs, Is its owner, New York magazine is mostly known for being the employer...

Getting a buzz Jeffrey Bernard I was sitting on a bar stool the other afternoon minding my business and a drink and talking in a desultory fashion to Richard the barman about...

Pig tales Alice Thomas Ellis S omeone is thrilled to bits with his latest publication. It is entitled The History of the British Pig and is by Julian Wiseman and I have to...

L ondon Chess Year continues with the Kleinwort Grieveson UK-US Chess Chal- lenge. This match of champions runs from Wednesday 14 to Friday 23 May at the Great Eastern Hotel,...

I a Competition No. 1418 you were in- vited to devise a last will and testament calculated to cause the maximum discord and confusion on the part of the living and the maximum...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or a copy of Chambers Dictionary, value £12.95 — ring the words 'Chambers Dictionary' above) will be awarded for the first...

You are invited to write a poem (maximum 12 lines) in which the last two words Of each line rhyme with one another. Entries to 'Competition No. 1421' by 16 May. The top winner...

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M r Mark Savage's Windrush Wines, of Cirencester, first came to my notice through the little-known grande marque Champagne Billecart-Salmon (6) . Once tasted, it became my house...

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