Stormy weather. T he British Government continued to suffer grave embarrassment in connection with the court case it is fighting in Sydney, Australia, where it is represented...

IRAN AND IDEOLOGY T he most depressing aspect of the Iran arms affair — apart from the slapstick geopolitics of the original conspiracy — is the way so many reactions to it...

Methinks the Attorney-General doth protest too much FERDINAND MOUNT B y now, Mr Justice Powell must be feeling a little like His Lordship in Hilaire Belloc's 'Obiter Dicta',...

I t is hard to see that Mr Neil Kinnock has done anything wrong in ringing up Mr Peter Wright's lawyer, Mr Malcolm Turn- bull, to find out what is happening in the Sydney spy...

And tell sad stories of the death of kings AUBERON WAUGH L et's face it, I mean to say we all make the occasional slip-up in our professions or callings. Typists leave errors...

President Reagan is trapped by the Iran crisis. Andrew Manderstam searches for possible escape routes Washington TM NOT ending up the turkey, Mr Donald Regan, the White House...

Nicholas von Hoffman examines how Ivan Boesky made so much money, and then lost some of it New York ON MANHATTAN'S Upper West Side workmen will soon be prising the bronze...

Zenga Longmore finds her search for the smart Jamaica frustrated by the unexpected `DON'T leave Jamaica without seeing Montego Bay,' my London Jamaican friends had enthused...

Civil Service (Briefing) Monday, 24 November Brian Sedgemore (Hackney South and Shoreditch): On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This concerns the use of a room within this...

John Ralston Saul finds poetic disagreement on East-West imperialism Belgrade GEO Bogza, Romania's greatest poet, opened this year's meeting of the Serbian Writers' Union by...

Profile: Alan Ross, sportsman, traveller, writer and editor AT SOME stage in his autobiography, Blindfold Games, Alan Ross tells a tanta- lising, highly charged story of how,...

THE fifteen New York Aldermen ac- cused of taking bribes for granting concessions of city railways seem likely to escape penal servitude. Two of them are under trial, and two of...

to grave faults in the Government's advertising campaign GOVERNMENTS have in the past used advertising successfully to promote objects in the public interest. Seventy years...

GUINNESS'S chairman, Ernest Saunders, is a man apt to mistake his critics for his enemies. That may come from listening to his admirers. They backed him, through the acrimonious...

The Government begins to doubt the goodness of Guinness CHRISTOPHER FILDES M y goodness, that's different. The Guinness inquiry set the City gasping and not just at finding...

THE City's leaders are subject to unusual stresses. A pillar of the money market complains to me that, taking the chair at an international financial conference the other day,...

OTHER ways with ownership and man- agement are now being canvassed in Bri- tain by Senator Russell Long from Louisiana: 'Populism,' he calls them, 'with- out Robin Hood.' That...

Sir: It is not true, as your diarist Frank Johnson suggested (29 November), that I am about to be sacked from Private Eye because I wrote the story at the centre of the recent...

Sir: Someone surely should open a betting book on who is/was, or who isn't/wasn't a KGB agent. Over the next five years, maybe ten, we might all have quite a lot of fun out of...

Unit's brilliant insight that Channel 4's Union World series had a `left-wing bias' rating of 45.5 per cent. Leaving aside the question of the MMU's definitions of `left-wing',...

Sir: Lady Longford's enquiry as to the `political stance' of the Media Monitoring Unit (Letters, 29 November) strikes me as a trifle disingenuous. From the outset we have stated...

Sir: May we request an inch or two of column space to correct some impressions made in an article in your issue dated 8 November? Under the peculiarly in- appropriate heading of...

Sir: Mr Barber's attack (Letters, 18 Octo- ber) on the use of `Japs' to describe the Japanese is similar in spirit to the incredi - ble furore which followed the Duke of...

Sir: If, as Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote last week, it was sometimes difficult to know what Billy McLean was really up to, it was always evident that, officially or unofficial-...

Sir: Mr Neil Kinnock is quoted (John Mortimer, 29 November) as saying, 'I'd fight if I were in Afghanistan'. On which side? He did not say. Catherine Donner 15 Chiddingstone...

Sir: John Osborne's proclaimed contempt for his audiences (Books, 29 November) surely amounts to abuse of an extinct species. Eryc Tate 47 Cowley Road, London Ell

used to be quite funny in the Daily Telegraph. What Lord Denning actually said, a propos Robert Maxwell, was "E's another German'. I changed it to 'foreigner' in my account so...

Sir: With reference to your editorial the week before last on the abolition of Radio Four's News Stand, may I draw your attention to the fact that editorials from the weekly...

Greece over a very bad line, it is amazing that there were only three slips. Two don't matter much — i.e. in the first column, 'Dara' should be 'Tara', and in column three (four...

Price! Please enter a subscription to The Spectator I enclose my cheque for £ (Equivalent SUS & Eurocheques accepted) RATES 12 Months 6 Months UK ❑ £45.00 ❑ £23 Europe...

A further selection of the best and most overrated books of the year by some of the Spectator's regular reviewers and contributors. Jennifer Paterson I enjoyed Mrs Wharton's...

The Enigmatic Edwardian, the Life of Reginald First Viscount Esher by James Lees-Milne. Enigmatic indeed, and absorbing. After wondering how subli- mated were the hot house...

Innocence (Collins) by Penelope Fitzgerald is the new book I have most enjoyed this year. I know of nobody who expresses so deftly and entertainingly, and without overdoing it,...

this year is Dermod MacCarthy's Sailing with Mr Belloc (Collins/Harvill), a memoir recalling the author's nerve- racking and hilarious coastal cruises in an ancient wooden...

When the literary editor asked me to participate in the same exercise last year, I forgot to mention one of the books I had most enjoyed: Patrick Devlin, Easing the Passing...

Two major contributions to modern his- tory during 1986 were Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Siege: the Saga of Israel and Zionism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and Martin Gilbert's Road...

William Empson was our last great poet- critic. He published no book in his last 25 years but we have now had three collec- tions of his matchless work since his death,...

The great discovery of 1986 for me has been Aubrey's Brief Lives. I feel like Randolph Churchill, who on reading the Bible in extenso for the first time ex- claimed, 'Why didn't...

I have to thank Bruce Palling, now the Independent's man in New Delhi, for intro- ducing me to the works of Norman Lewis and, recently, to Lewis himself. Lewis's newest book of...

The most enjoyable book I read this year was James Lees-Milne's The Enigmatic Edwardian, the life of Lord Esher. He turned a man who has long been a shadow into a comprehensible...

For reasons known only to me I have chosen to read mostly prison memoirs throughout the year. Needless to say, Against All Hope, by Armando Valla- dares, the Cuban poet was the...

Fay Weldon's The Shrapnel Academy (Hodder & Stoughton), a dark comedy of warfare between revolutionary servants below stairs and their psychopathic betters above, is a breakaway...

Very rarely, a novel sometimes proves to be so enjoyable that tears of sentimental pleasure ooze from the eyes of even the most jaded of readers. One such excep- tional book is...

If there were a category of underrated books of the year, Elizabeth Jennings's Collected Poems (Carcanet) would be my number-one choice. From the first (the earliest pieces here...

The novel I have most enjoyed is not available in bookshops. This is The Great Advertisment for Marriage, a comi-tragic dispatch from the battle of the sexes by David Sherwin....

Two books in the year by two of the country's most gifted men. If only my own profession could produce anything as wise and funny as Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils (Hutchinson)...

Since, many pre-Hype-Hype-Huirrah years ago, Cyril Connolly farmed out his pile of Booker Prize jury fodder to me for pre- liminary testing (the only plum I managed to pull out...

Peter Levi PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS by Robin Lane Fox Viking, £17.85 I t is not so often that one gets the chance to review a full and nourishing book about an important subject...

After packing 9,000 of them into tea- chests, I felt as though I never wanted to see a book again. The addiction soon returns. Christopher Hope's The Hottentot Room (Heinemann),...

Flora Fraser's Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma Hamilton (Weidenfeld and Nicol- son) has converted me to a character I used to dislike and filled me with admiration for her...

`Have your written any books?' I once heard a girl ask Peter Quennell. 'You are very pretty,' he said, 'but not very well educated.' Horror of being rude to authors is not,...

Kind people would be very sorry if they knew how little I read except in the course of duty. Well, apart from those I've already pontificated about in these pages, I was...

David Sexton THE ROYAL BEASTS AND OTHER WORKS by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden Chatto & Winclus, £12.95 B y the time he was 13 William Empson had already taken...

Richard Shone PEGGY: THE WAYWARD GUGGENHEIM by Jacqueline Bograd Weld Bodley Head, f15 T here is a great deal of penetration in this book, little of it psychological. Pe gg y...

Chris Petit A LIFE IN MOVIES by Michael Powell Heinemann, £15.95 M ichael Powell was born in 1905 and so grew up with the cinema. The industry was barely a decade old when he...

Francis King THE MASTER ECCENTRIC: THE JOURNALS OF RAYNER HEPPENSTALL 1969-1981 edited by Jonathan Goodman Allison & Busby, £14.95 THE PIER by Rayner Heppenstall Allison &...

In Memory of P.H.G. St Andrew's Day, blind November fumbling The hurt leaves, bleached gutter orphans. Half-light domesticates raw brick. A mediocre day, not to be...

Brian Masters BEST OF FRIENDS: THE BRENAN-PARTRIDGE LE 1 1 FRS selected and edited by Xan Fielding Chatto & Windus, f14.95 T he earlier part of this correspondence is weirdly...

Andrew Gimson THE COMPLETE UPMANSHIP by Stephen Potter Grafton, f6.95 G amesmanship began, it will be re- membered, on 8 June 1931, when C. Joad and S. Potter, playing for...

The blues align their wavelengths: peacock, sky, The silvered blue you're wearing, ghosts of blue In the pale air, blue echoes in the eye. What are you reading? Something so...

I imagine it starts somewhere Up there, among those mountain-cutters Shaping overhangs frozen to the royal Sky like photographs. It ends where I stand, igniting The creek with...

Punk rock The revolution that failed Marcus Berkmann A s the record industry prepares for yet another profitable winter, with the Christ- mas charts destined to be dominated...

The Turner Prize: works by short-listed artists (Tate Gallery till 7 December) Fancied favourites Giles Auty I n the media run-up to this year's £10,000 Turner Prize, awarded...

The Women (Old Vic) Selling the Sizzle (Hampstead) Other halves Christopher Edwards he women who inspired this play', wrote the female author in 1936, 'deserve to be smacked...

Therese (PG', selected cinemas) Return of the saint Peter Ackroyd S aints are principally notorious for the hagiographies which they inspire, or for the blasphemies which...

Singularly silent Peter Phillips M Amsterdam y peregrinations around Europe as self-styled ambassador of Renaissance music in general and English choral singing in particular...

Rough ride Wendy Cope S everal people tell me that my counter- part in the New Statesman, Hugo Williams, has been under attack on the letters page of that publication because...

Generous to a fault Taki A New York s everyone who has ever heard of fhe word eleemosynary knows, the earlY month of December in New York is to social mountaineers what August...

Pack drill Alice Thomas Ellis J anet went off and bought us a new duvet recently because the feathers in the old one had migrated into one corner which just about served to...

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

Raymond Keene As promised, here is a further selec- tion of the best games from the important and fascinatin g tournament at Tilburg. The indefatigable Bob Wade, arbiter of the...

Elsiemos Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1449 you were asked for an imaginary letter to the outside world from the first visitor to a lost island, describin g its unique flora,...

I .101. 2 074L.,J0L4komk...„" PUDDING before cheese or cheese before pudding? Search the cookery columns of the newspapers and you'll find no guidance on such crucial...

You are invited to write an un- Tennysonian poem in the metre of In Memoriam and beginning 'Ring out, wild bells . . .', to usher in the New Year (maximum 16 lines). Entries to...

are respec- tively 40+17 in 11, 22+14 in 38, 36+3 in 37 and i 8+4 i n 29. Winners: Fiona Walton, Moseley, Birmingham (Hennessy X.0 Cognac); L. E. Thomas, Ban- gor, Gwynedd; T....