political standards began slipping on both sides, as a fore- taste of unpleasant election campaigns. The Labour Party Conference made a bold bid for a brave new world, but party...

A YEAR ago the Tories torgathered at Llandudno in an atmosphere none too bright. By the time they dispersed, their mood bad been transformed to one of con- fidence and the...

No. 7058 Establ ished 1828 FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1963

The New World of Mr. Wilson By DAVID WATT courageous dispute it must all have seemed very familiar. There on the Scarborough seashore play the children of the eminent; there...

T HE last few weeks have seen an extraordinary number of statements on the subject of sex, some 'liberal,' some more traditional, all of them based on very little in the way of...

p RESIDENT DE GALII LE'S tour of south-eastern France has been widely interpreted as the beginning of his campaign for another presi- dential term. A certain sharpening of the...

In fulfilment of this promise there is an im-; pressive and continuously entertaining demon- stration of Mr. Huxley's literary and scientific knowledge. Eventually, and after a...

CLIVE IRVING writes: In the last year or two it became fashionable to take knocks at Arthur Christiansen, the technical creator of the Daily Express. He became a butt of Private...

the judiciary has not entirely cleared the muddy waters which the remarks stirred up. It is of course laughable to suppose ttiat the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Denning, or any...

T HE current issue of Where?, the quarterly magazine of the Advisory Centre for Edu- cation, contains the announcement of the set- ting up of a National Extension College which...

From MURRAY KEMPTON wASBINGToN O N a Sunday, persons still unknown and unlikely ever to be punished blew up Bir- mingham's 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four Negro girls...

T HIS week's celebrations of the fourteenth I anniversary of the Chinese People's Republic coincided with a lull in Russo-Chinese vitupera- tion, but it would be a mistake to...

not the gift of perpetual youth (which would soon get him ostracised by his ageing contemporaries without necessarily endearing him to their juniors), but the gift of crisp old...

When I was a child our Scottish housekeeper used to lessen the impact of all disasters, mishaps or disappointments by reminding us that 'Worse happened at Culloden,' and I grew...

to des- cribe itself as 'A Rational Approach to the Modern World . ; equally any periodical is entitled to print, consecutively, three articles entitled 'What is Man?' 'My...

There was, I discovered, no dining-car on the Saturday night train (ETD 1940 hours) from Euston to Inverness, but I was well placed in the long queue for the buffet where a...

indignation dies that is felt in, and indeed outside, literary circles at the manner in which Harcourt Brace, the New York publishers, pole-axed their British subsidiary, Rupert...

One often comes across the expression the words stuck in his throat.' I never knew what it meant until last Sunday, with forty acres of sodden barley still to 'combine and a...

By . JULIAN CRITCHLEY, MP O NCE a year there is an invitation from the War Office for an all-party delegation of MPs to visit Rhine Army. Details are circu- lated to every MP in...

By A. D. C. PETERSON T HE Commonwealth Universities Conference, and particularly Sir Eric Ashby's opening address, have reminded us that the period of 'Waiting for Robbins' is...

Lawyers' Loot 'City Solicitor,' A. R. Jackson Mr. Sukarno's Democracy Edmund Quek Scow Hong Liberal Extremism Noel Newsonie, Freda Cruickshank The Lonely Ones Olga Bailey...

SIR,—Mr. Sukarno's letter (Spectator, September 20) has been the subject of much amusement in this part of the world. On first reading, one had the definite impression that it...

SIR,—Mr. Alfred Sherman's argument that the danger implicit in a growth of Liberal strength through capture of the floating vote is that this would set the extremists of the...

to- be bewildered by the phrase, 'a class structure in which a section of the middle class feels permanently threatened from above and below.' He does not know its meaning and...

'clients' who entrust themselves to his House Owners' Society as he is with the figures he quotes in his letter last week, then they are in for pretty poor service. Solicitors...

Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), escaped to Swaziland from South Africa in order to represent his organisation at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee in...

SIR,-My original article established one thing if nothing else, that birth control is a subject which arouses strong reaction from Catholics. (I don't ex- pect you would have...

lent and informative article describing the facilities that are available up and down the country for bringing people of similar interests into contact one with another : and...

Girl Guides Station Six — Sahara. (Plaza.) — In the French Style. (Columbia) (Both 'X' certificate.) FROM the banalest situa- tion in the annals of story-telling (let alone...

To take modern dance first. In Britain this term became associated with the Central Euro- pean dance movement of angst, flat feet and misery. In the United States, inspired by...

By MALCOLM RUTHERFORD The Representative. (Ald- wych.)—Six of One. (Adelphi.) It is a mistake to suppose that The Represen- tative is a presentation of the arguments for and...

AVID readers of the TV programme papers will have cheered or groaned to notice this week that we are about to enter the era of serious, self-improving viewing. The BBC has a...

I TALKED last week to Anthony Caro. Now nearing forty, this most questing of Moore's former assistants has in- spired a brood of . • • • School to re-examine young sculptors...

But for Beaumont-Hamel . . • BY JOHN BAYLEY . - r swain a theme and sought for it in vain' . the opening line of Yeats's poem is the candid cry of the professional bard, and it...

France : Change and Tradition. By Stanley Hoffmann and others. (Gollancz, 42s.) IT is a curious paradox that in the distribution of topics in this book the American...

A Dream of Tartary : The Origins and Misfor- tunes of Henry P'u Yi. By Henry McAleavy. (Allen and Unwin, 30s.) THE subject of this interesting study was wear- ing spats and a...

G REEN lives with his wife in Belgravia. He has now become a hermit. Only the other day a woman of sixty looking after the tobacco- nist's shop was dragged by her hair across...

B Y DAVID CAUTE W HEN the earliest of the separate chapters which comprise Mr. Mehta's new book* originally appeared in the New Yorker, the despair which at first typified the...

My First Hundred Years. By Margaret Murray, (Kimber, 30s.) IT is memory that lifts man to the angels. Without it he would be no more creative than the fly that lives for a day....

What ordered power! Such colours And such forms! A molten swirl As if of robes of ancient days, Soft pastels and stern primaries, A line which bears you where it will. The...

The Fall of the House of Habsburg. By Edward Crankshaw. (Longmans, 45s.) IN October, 1918, the Habsburg Empire died an unnatural death (suicide, murder?); since then, it has had...

WHEN the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940 the Danes surrendered without fighting. Because of this, of their food production and `nordic blood' the Germans did not exercise that...

BY F. W. BATESON J N spite of being Queen Victoria's 'sinister' son (by John Brown, one presumes), Mr. Salteena of The Young Visiters was 'not quiet a gentle- man.' Almost but...

The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi. Translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and edited with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Hull Walton. (Neville Spear- man,...

An Elderly Retired Man. By Kathleen Nott. (Faber, 21s.) The South begins with the death of the narra- tor's father, and proceeds to a retrospect of the narrator's life up to...

Today I believe in winter, In perpetual cold, and the, certainty of death; In premonitions, beading the wires like birds Parcelled in ice, choked by their frozen breath. I...

By CUSTOS A 'POLITICAL' market was to be expected with the Labour Party conference in session, but the image which Mr. Harold Wilson would like to create is obviously not one...

By LOTHBURY As previously reported, the group net profits ,n for the year to March 31, 1963, from Great Universal Stores were £13.152 million against El2.229 million. Once...

Elizabethan Taste. By John Buxton. (Macmillan, 35s.) COLERIDGE was always ready to take a snuffling, preacherly line when talking of the Elizabethans provided Shakespeare was...

Le Rouge et le Noir By ELIZABETH DAVID BLACK looks give all dishes in which auber- gines cooked in their skins—as with rare ex- ceptions they should be — an .alluring and...

By LESLIE' ADRIAN wen t posed to sail ahead of the passenger boat so that the cars will be unloaded and ready to drive away when the passenger boat arrives. Loading, however,...

By ALAN BRIEN IT was Arthur Koestler who christened the disease 'French flu' many years ago. Like ordinary in- fluenza, it tends to be most virulent just after long wars and...