The general verdict of the teaching profession itself on the new salary scales announced by the Burnham Committee this week is likely to be that while the increments proposed...

By the time this issue of the Spectator is in the hands of readers, the London compositors will have returned to work. The end of the printing dispute comes too late to make the...

T HE King's Speech is not an exciting document, and the conclusion that it heralds a General Election is, to say the least, premature. Legislation to make available " on a...

The working of nationalised industries is to be subject to periodical review. Almost casually, and with a noticeable lack of precision as to detail, Mr. Morrison made this...

Tibet from the east and north-east, where the wide and sparsely populated districts of Chinghai and Sikang, though forming part of the Tibetan massif, have for many years been...

There seems a good prospect that the United Nations Assembly will reverse its decision of 1946, declaring a partial diplomatic boycott of Spain, and open the door to the asso-...

The report of the Social and Industrial Commission of the Church Assembly on the ethics of betting and gambling is an interesting and in some ways surprising document. The...

T HE second session of the present Parliament opened on Tuesday. It may well prove to be not merely the second but the last. Surprisingly as the Government, with its tenuous and...

aston- ishing capacity for talking—something less than sense. What, for example, is to be made of this, in a sermon last Sunday : " Our abler young men of university standing...

Chancellor would do well to take the trouble to go to Cambridge on November 10th and record their votes—voting is in person only—for the result, there is reason to think, is by...

of television it might be worth considering—perhaps the Beveridge Committee on the B.B.C. will consider—how far a considerable spread of television is desirable. All the...

deeply deplored throughout Cornwall. Dr. Hunkin was a Cornish- man through and through, and having been the son of a Methodist lay preacher, and educated at a Methodist school,...

H OW much unreality, I wonder, is there in the military and political discussions about a European army and the co- operation of the Germans and the possibility of the use of...

By VERNON BARTLETT F ROM the terrace of the Grand Hotel one looks across the Blue Nile (as yellow as the Blue Danube) to a sandy plain, beyond which rise the mosques of...

By WILSON HARRIS I N the year 1912 Dr. Montagu Butler, then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, delivered the Romanes Lecture at Oxford on " Lord Chatham as an Orator." In...

By DAVID THOMSON Princeton, New Jersey. U NIVERSITIES on both sides of the Atlantic have just been busy settling down to another academic year, and the preoccupied and harassed...

By HAROLD NICOLSON T HE Speaker of the House of Commons, the Serjeant at Arms and the officers and attendants are to be con- gratulated upon the excellence of the arrangements...

MR. Lovat Dickson's book about Richard Hillary, the young airman-writer who was killed in 1943, is not very interesting.* Most of it consists of a more or less straight- forward...

The Secret Army. By T. Bor-Komorowski. (Gollancz. 21s.) ON August 1st, 1944, the Warsaw detachments of the Home Army (a nation-wide underground organisation of which General...

Tales from Portugal Farrusco. By Miguel Torga. Translated by Denis Brass. (Allen & Unwin 15s.). WE do not see enough contemporary Portuguese literature here ; this translation...

Testament for Social Science. By Barbara Wootton. (Allen and Unwin. 15s.) The Age of Elegance : 1812-1822. By Arthur Bryant. (Collins. 15s.) Confident Morning. By Sir Harold...

Letters of Marcel Proust. Translated and edited with notes by Mina Curtiss. (Chatto & Windus. 21s.) THIS volume will delight Proustians, for it is an admirable handbook to the...

The Red Beret. By Hilary St. George Saunders. (Michael Joseph. 15s.). MUCH of the cream of the war-time soldiers went to the airborne' forces, and so did many of the best...

IT was, of course, far more than a peasants' revolt, as the authors of this new monograph point out : there were a great many causes for the disturbance, which indeed was a...

To Love and be Wise. By Josephine Tey. (Peter Davies. 9s. 6d.) UNDOUBTEDLY The Wall is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction. The device Hersey has used for his story is...

Set by Margaret Usborne A prize of £5, which may be divided, is offered for a poem (of not more than eight lines) to go in a visitors' book, which makes the best of things on...

political si g . nificance of Alice in Wonderland. A prize of £5 was offered for a lean to the Press protesting against the' political implications of one of the following :...

SIR, —I know I am not the only reader of the Spectator who groans at receiving the depleted paper of recent weeks ; and, while we pity our- selves, our sympathy goes out to you...

BEEF AND TWO VEG. SIR,—Mr. Nicolson's Mar g inal Comment in your issue of October loth on English restaurants today, is marred by his attribution of a general decline in...

SIR,—General Clay, in his recently published Decision in Germany, referring to the newspapers licensed by the Americans in their zone in Germany, states : " Only in Bremen and...

SIR,—Janus calls " rather dangerous ground ' Mr. Churchill's assertion at Blackpool that twelve University Members would have given the Tories a majority of six in the latest...

Sin,—Mr. A. R. Clough expresses a wish to understand the cause of the " green flash " seen at times as the sun sets into a clear sea, for example in the Mediterranean and Indian...

IT was a great day for the annual affair, when nine parishes in West Kent combined for the Weald Ploughing Match. I went down early, for the morning was tempting, beginning with...

covering about thirty acres. By ten o'clock the larger field was patterned over with rect- angles, some along, some across, to each competitor, leisurely working his bit of...

I have dared to leave the Cornice pears on the wall until this week, but I would not offer this as a practice for gardeners whose trees are not well above the frost-line, and...

" Paurrry voices•but no tradition "—such was the charitable summing- up of the position at Covent Garden by one of the most distinguished recent guest-artists at the...

" The Glass Menagerie." (Warner. )—" If You Feel like Singing." (Empire.)--" The Wolf of the Sila." (New Gallery.) Mr. Tamassze WILLIAMS' obsession with ageing ex-belles from...

Festival Ballet : Markova, Dolin. (Stoll Theatre.) MAIUCOVA'S fragile and lovely magic seemed to have deserted her at the beginning of last week when, with Anton Dolin, she...

. THEATRE Who Is Sylvia ? By Terence Rattigan. (Criterion.) SYLVIA 'is, really, a wistful memory, the haunting and indelible image of a girl whom the Earl of Binfield—then a...