Meanwhile, Mr Johnson's decision to with dr 1 ,'lw from the presidential contest does give "nil a freedom of manoeuvre which he could not otherwise have had. He may not be able...

Getting on for two hundred years ago, Lord George Gordon (of the Gordon riots) delivered his verdict on the political situa- tion of the day : 'The Government has lost the...

Mr Johnson astonished everyone by announcing that he did not choose to run for President in 1968; and those who do so choose are running very much harder. First off the mark was...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH It needs someone with Mr Crossman's infallible common touch to know that what the country is yearning for above everything else at the...

AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON New York—Mr Johnson's departure is the final evidence that the game of political commentary is up for the indefinite future. The explanation of an event...

CZECHOSLOVAKIA TIBOR SZAMUELY For forty-five years now the critics have been arguing about whether that immortal literary hero, the good soldier Schweik, was actually a...

MIDDLE EAST-1 DAVID PRYCE-JONES Amman—In the streets of Amman now the members of the Fatah, the resistance move- ment dedicated to reconquering Israel, are in evidence as never...

MIDDLE EAST-2 DEV MURARKA Moscow—Consolidate and diversify : this is the spirit in which Soviet diplomacy is dealing with the supercharged atmosphere of the Middle East. The...

PATRICK COSGRAVE 'Things fall apart,' Yeats wrote, 'The centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' In the last few weeks that description has seemed more than...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS `What had been an orderly and disciplined demonstration changed momentum when a yogi decided to stand on his head at the corner of Downing Street.'—The...

PAROLE GILES PLAYFAIR The much-vaunted parole system, intended, we were assured, as a bold assault on the hitherto intractable problem of overcrowding in prisons, came into...

From the 'Spectator'. 4 April 1868—It ought to be an offence for Members of Parliament to end a great division on Friday night. What is the use of Parliament except to furnish...

NIGEL LAWSON Thoughtful Germans have never taken parlia- mentary democracy for granted. Although the present experiment has lasted longer and been infinitely more successful...

PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON The writing of fiction, regarded as an occupa- tion, bears certain resemblances to prostitution. It is a career open to the talents, which can...

EDUCATION STUART MACLURE With the National Union of Students in session at Leicester University this weekend, the air will be rent with wild and provocative talk of student...

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM JOCK HUGHES-HALLETT Admiral Hughes-Hallett was a junior minister in the last Conservative administration. For a great many years the House of Commons has...

THE LAW R. A. CLINE There is not much doubt that something went wrong at Leeds Assizes and the Lord Chief Justice has now in effect said so. 'The facts will out' is not enough;...

SCIENCE PETER J. SMITH There is something delightfully amusing in the thought of the majesty of Parliament being brought to bear on the inevitability of nature. When, some time...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY Freedom may prove to be no more indivisible than the atom, but it is at least arguable that if all those particles had linked arms a bit more firmly we...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN San Francisco—I went from the St Francis Hotel to a drug store (it called itself a phar- macy) at 8.30 a.m. It was shut, thus confirming my belief that...

CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN When Gwen Raverat's American mother visited Cambridge, England, for the first time in the spring of 1883 she wrote home, 'I am at last at the...

PAUL GRINKE Philip Hofer's Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman (Oxford University Press 70s) is the first serious attempt to take Edward Lear at his own valuation as a...

MORDECAI RICHLER Black Power Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (Cape 30s) Much as I hate to admit it, it's not the decent people in the middle, rather the white bigots...

GORONWY REES Editor Kingsley Martin (Hutchinson 42s) The Left Review : October 1934-May 1938 (Cass, eight volumes, £48) I greatly enjoyed Father Figures, the first volume of...

RONALD HINGLEY Red Prelude: a Biography of Zhelyabov David Footman (Barrie and Rockliff 25s) Tolstoy Henri Troyat (W. H. Allen 84s) The Bridge and the Abyss: the Troubled...

ROBERT HUGHES Cagliostro Francois Ribadeau Dumas (Allen and Unwin 50s) A few weeks ago, Count Cagliostro's silver shoe-buckles, engraved with zodiacal emblems, made £80 at...

Jean Rhys (Deutsch 25s) Bitter-sweet RAYNER HEPPENSTALL A thing I notice annually is that when, come Christmas, regular reviewers and stray celebri- ties tell us in the...

Double Diploma : The life of Sir Pierson Dixon, don and diplomat Piers Dixon (Hutch- inson 55s). Mr Dixon has produced another in the line of unexceptional biographies of ex-...

D. C. WATT Recent studies from the United States, in par- ticular Mrs Wohlstetter's examination of Pearl Harbour and Professor Klaus Knorr's article on the Cuban missile...

HAGIWARA Translated from the Japanese by Graeme Wilson Things like dogs, by barking; by becoming Deformed children, things like geese; Things, by shining in the night, like...

THEATRE Invisible man HILARY SPURLING Tom Stoppard is a curious phenomenon. Last year we had his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which, by an ingenious twist,...

BRYAN ROBERTSON The Hepworth show at the Tate is one of the grand occasions in the art life of this country: awe-inspiring as a retrospective survey of a lifetinie's...

Sporting move . PENELOPE HOUSTON Hugs and Kisses (Paris-Pullman, 'X') Arguments on •the more theoretical operations of censorship are liable to break down in out- bursts of...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD I must confess that I take up a pamphlet called A Christian Approach to Television (Church Information Service 2s 6d) with considerable suspicion. As the...

HAROLD LEVER, MP Harold' Lever is Financial Secretary to the Treaility. The psoblem the businessman has tt$ live with is thatfoday the government makes the market or...

survey IA1N MACLEOD, MP lain Mackod is Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr Jenkins is the vogue. If he had stood up on budget day and recited the list of trains arriving...

F. A. BISHOP F. A. Bishop, after a civil service career in which he was principal private secretary to two Prime Ministers, deputy secretary to the Cabinet, and permanent,...

GEORGE BOLTON Sir George Bolton, chairman of the Bank of London and South America, has just retired from the Court of the Bank of England. This year 1968 is already certain to...

CHRISTOPHER FILDES This year and last seem already to have found their place in the economic history books: `1967-68: the Flight from Money.' The books will point to the steep...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT So President Johnson has finally decided that he cannot destroy the communist forces of North Vietnam without destroying the morale and unity of the United...

FINANCE USA WILLIAM JANEWAY The past week has witnessed the most dramatic demonstration imaginable of the current and prospective nature of the relationship between Washington...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL I have decided to invest in the biggest flop of the year—the f40 million Greater London Council loan at 7} per cent. Issued last week on very tight terms,...

CUSTOS The pace was too hot to hold; and the stock market has been falling back from the record levels attained last week. The Financial Times index, 442 at the close of...

Sir: Having just read Sir Alec Douglas-Home's article in your issue of 15 March (`After the hangings, what now?'), could I just mention that there is one non-racial country left...

Sir: Mr Peter J. Smith (1 March) has it right only up to a point. His idea of an appointive- cum-elective House of Commons is no bad one. But it would not cure the basic malady...

LETTERS From Anthony Lewis, Leslie Bilsby, Anna M. B. Moore, Allan Hale, Roderick L. Badams, Gilbert H. Archdale, Rear-Admiral C. H. S. Wise, FtN (Reid.), 'A Young Athenian,'...

Sir: We were delighted when you commissioned Messrs Donnison, Pilcher and Waddilove to write on housing (29 December), and again now to find Neil Wates—in the `Business view-...

Sir: Though my theological persuasion is that which would normally be called 'fundamentalist' and is thus far away from the movement to- wards unity with the Anglican church, I...

Sir : In 'Spectator's Notebook' (8 March) Mr. Thompson suggests that the pressures caused by population growth in this country give us only two alternatives—'total immersion in...

Sir : In the letter from 'An Old Athenian' to the SPECTATOR of 22 March, which is indeed confused beyond measure, there is a sentence revealing in a perfectly clear way the...

Sir: I have read the article in your issue of 29 March in which Lord Walston gives a roseate picture of Cuba, speaks of the evil done to that country by the sugar millionaires,...

Sir : It may be that the worthy critic, Mr Henry Tube, in the SPECTATOR of 22 March, has never heard of either Strindberg or Ibsen—which might, possibly, account for the...

Sir: The SPECTATOR appears to be one of the few publications willing to give an airing to a possible injustice being done to a minority group without voting influence. I would,...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS Colonel Chamois Loon, who left the Ministry of Defence last year after sensational revelations about government snooping had been made in a daily...

COMPETITION 'The most controversial, most unpredictable, most liked and disliked of all modern politi- cians,' George Brown no less, described in the Sunday Times, 31 March,...

Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were asked to concoct examples of 'opening sentence one- upmanship' in the style of a real or imagined critic of the arts. Thackeray's...

PHILIDOR White Black 12 men 8 men M. Parthasarthy (1st Prize, Probleemblad, 1966) White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 380 (Driver): Q - K...

Across 1 Part of a novel musical combination (12) 8 Chamber music that comes to nought? (9) 9 Nothing with crab for this bean! (5) 11 Otherwise softwood makes up a trial (6) 12...