Mr. Macmillan thought of going to Moscow, a general strike took Place in Malta and aparticular strike was narrowly averted in Dagenham, and the Government an- nounced that it...

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1959

O F all government departments, the Home Office is most likely to pay exaggerated defer- ence to something called 'public opinion.' Even those Home Secretaries who take office...

A FTER ' Stockton-on-Tees, Moscow? Mr. Macmillan looks like becoming quite a gad- about. It would be nice to hope that the Prime Minister would make more of an impression on the...

T HE growth of the gold and foreign exchange reserves, and the strength of sterling during January, exceeded the best expectations, and showed conclusively how greater...

By our Industrial Correspondent R ESTRICTIVE practices and demarcation dis- putes are subjects which consume a lot of ink in a year. People like Mr. Ted Hill call them 'the...

By RICHARD TN September of 1952, General Eisenhower, at 'the height of his first campaign for the Presi- dency, met with the late Senator Robert A. Taft in New York, and there...

QUESTIONS this week have elicited the startling information that the world is now revolving more slowly than it used to. This sinister indication of the decline of the West (and...

neutral umpires in Test matches now seems to me unanswerable. After one has made all the ritual Pious noises about the difficulties of an umpire's job and about how the man on...

THE SILLY SEASON, I suppose, will now be with us until the election, but we are unlikely to be given a worse example of political inanity than the row over the survey 'of public...

that 'Courts of Law are the proper places where the legal fate of books should be decided,' and that Lolita should not 'be lifted out of the reach of the law, by having literary...

of Lolita was found guilty of publish- ing an obscene libel in 1956. I had-not forgotten, but am unable to see how those prosecutions are relevant. Mr. Woodruff can hardly...

Cape overdid it with a hand-out on a new book about atomic radiation. It began : 'The recent setting-up of a Tissue Bank in this country (a scheme supported by the Medical...

of the Atlantic in Senator Fulbright's succession to the chairmanship of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee than that this influential position should have fallen to the...

commercial television, and 1 expect I shall say them again—or things of the same sort. So it is pleasant to be able to congratulate the Granada organisation which, and not for...

By OLIVER STEWART A /ATION and politics are in a desperate grapple. The air transport engineer proposes, but the politician (not necessarily the one who sits in Parliament)...

say that his favourite headline, which he claimed to have seen in an evening paper, was: ALLEGED WEST-END CLUBMAN'S FATAL FALL OVER CAT preferring it to his own paper's :...

By L. F. RUSHBROOK WILLIAMS New Delhi S INCE speech is still free — and very free — in India, it does not take anyone who knows the country long to discover that there is...

A Schoolboy in the Revolution BRIEN By ALAN No schoolboy was ever afraid of a revolution. It is the externalisation Of ' his own re- pressed fantasies. Whatever the revolution...

Foot-loose `A-ONE: A-TWO: a-cha- cha-cha' said a passing voice with determined cheerfulness. The couples stamped and simpered She was quite right. The instructors came in a...

Euston Road Festival By DAVID CAIRNS A CORRESPONDENT recently took me to task for complain- ing about the feebleness of the January programmes, and in particular about the...

The Lin-Italian Woman By ISABEL QUIGLY Fortunella. (Cameo-Poly.) THE latest bulletin from Uni- talia, the organisation that sends us news of Italian film production in the...

Mid-Atlantic Accent By PETER FORSTER IN America, from whence duty and my battered liver at last bade me return, critics can pre- view and therefore pre-review many programmes....

Cars From Europe By LESLIE ADRIAN IF your sturdy British con- science allows you to think of buying a foreign car, will you be making life unnecessarily complicated for...

The Eyes Have It By MILES HOWARD A COLLEAGUE in ophthalmic practice writes to say that after years of working with patients sent up because of headache, she is coming round to...

By STRIA W HEN I was a boy there was a game called 'Beaver.' Except that it cost nothing to play and had rules which were simple to the point of inanity, it had little to...

SIR,—I want to take issue with Taper's comments on the Pensions debate. First, he expressed the view that it was 'vieux jete to hope. that 'an election-year debate on pensions...

The Books Bill Sir Alan Herbert Censorship in Ireland Oliver Edwards The Pensions Debate R. H. S. Grossman, MP Meeting the People Silvan Jones Papal Infallibility I. L. A....

SIR,—I have just made the discovery that opinions ex- pressed by the Dublin censor may be effective even outside the area--the Twenty-six Counties—in which his writ runs....

SIR,—Plays written before 1743 are not, as Pharos supposes, immune to censorship. The Lord Chamber- lain can ban the production of any play produced before 1737 (when the Act...

SIR,—I thank you for the kindly support that you and your writers gave to my entrance on the Harrow scene. But may I offer a correction to your remarks upon my exit? You say...

in the House of Commons, asked the Attorney-General `what action he proposed to take in regard to the novel The Naked and the Dead.' Sir Hartley Shawcross then told the House...

an (Ecumenical Council make heartening reading for those who have the interests of a united Christendom at heart. But I wonder whether he does justice to Anglican...

SIR,—I -waited sadly for the axes to fall on Taper' neck, stuck out so gallantly on behalf of the little individual liberties which we are losing swiftly now by law, bye-law ,...

SIR,—Mr. Hcyworth's letter hardly furthers the cause he advocates. Nci great discernment is required to declare that much of the contemporary music played in London is...

papal infallibility 'is not likely to gain wide support.' One can see why. If the present Pope were to declare ex cathedra that he is not infallible, he would tacitly admit ka)...

SIR,--4 was with Mr. Gaitskell during part of his recent visit to North Wales, .and I should like to say that your editririal comment on this sort of activity was wide of the....

SIR.– It was good to find someone with original ideas about transport breaking through the barrier of authoritarianism, as Ian Nairn did. But is his thesis not also a form of...

SIR,—My twelve-year-old god-daughter Lolly is pining for an autographed picture of John Gordon. Would any of your readers be prepared to 'exchange such a relic against three...

But- the fact remains that a laudatory notice of an ill-attended concert, however heart-warming it may be to the promoter, is not a negotiable instru- ment when it comes to...

Nasser for many Years before she, like Britain against Hitler, decided that since attack was imminent, she would forestall it rather than passively await it. Since Britain...

FEBRUARY 8, 1834 THE literary world has just escaped from the imminent danger of having a cherished mystery revealed. We are happy to find that the problem of the authorship of...

Romantic and Heretic? BY F. R. LEAVIS T HE doctrine of 'impersonality' that was referred to the other day in the Spectator as still a major force in the literary culture that...

The Voyage of Argo. By Apollonius of Rhodes. Translated with an hitroduction by E. V. Rieu. (Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.) cover of this book reproduces the Pistoxenus Painter's...

ALABASTER (1568-1640) had an interesting career, oscillating rapidly between the English Church and Rome; but hitherto no one has thought it worth the trouble to edit his...

Havelock Ellis: A Biography. By Arthur Calder-Marshall. (Hart-Davis, 30s.) An Artist of Life: A Study of the Life and Work of Havelock Ellis. By John Stewart Collis. (Cassell,...

WHEN, exactly one hundred years ago, Samuel Smiles published his famous book—`the art of achievement illustrated by accounts of the lives of great men'—two of his crown...

No Love for Johnnie. By Wilfred Fienhurgh. (Hutchinson, I5s.) • Ar the Labour Party Conference in Brighton last year, I was coming down the stair's after the morning...

NORMAN LEVINE'S account of a return journey to his native Canada in 1956 makes Miller's Air- Conditioned Nightmare read like an USIS hand- out. The author sails across the...

The Tortoises. By Loys Masson. Translated by . 16s.) Fee • Fi Fo Fun: - A Book of Fairy Stories. By Osbert Sitwell. (Macmillan. 15s.) The Losers. By Clifford Irving....

The Powers Behind the Prime Ministers. By Sir Charles Petrie. (MacGibbon and Kee, 21s.) `EXCEPT the married state, there is none in which so great a confidence is involved, in...

IF one of the problems of writing the life of either Jefferson or Hamilton is that they were compli- cated, in some ways even devious, characters, one of the difficulties in...

ACROSS 1 Aid in learning to hold the tongue? (4-4) 5 Jolly tar for a period? (6) 9 Faint in civil defence (5-3) 10 Depart but might have been quartered in confusion (6) 12 Thy...

ACROSS.-1 Mi.kwood. 5 Hamm 9 Momentum. 10 Scarab. 12 Iridal. 13 Brassier. IS Metallurgist. 18 Pitch and toss. 23 Conspire. 24 Stitch. 26 Raisin. 27 Painters. 28 Signet, 29...

The Three Graces: The Legends and the Truth. By Serge Lifer. (Cassell, 21s.) THIS account is no part of the ballet-popularising literature that floods out of publishing houses...

Stranger Than Fiction. By Dennis Wheatley. (Hutchinson, 25s.) Stranger Than Fiction is a collection of Dennis Wheatley's war papers; and the story of how he came to have any to...

The Life and Times of Frederick Lemaitre. By Robert Baldick. (Hanish Hamilton, 25s.) His father died when Frederick Lemaitre was nine years old. He followed a variety of...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IN the prospectus of the latest Unit Trust the sponsors very wisely remind the small investor that any general decline in Stock Exchange prices, even one...

By CUSTOS T HE steam has gone out of the equity share market and not unnaturally gold shares and gilt-edged stocks are moving up. The new Barbados loan established one premium...

I NTERNATIONAL COMPUTORS AND TABULATORS is the new name for the mer- ger between British Tabulating Machines (Hol- lerith) and Power-Samas Accounting Machines. This was...

Next to November, February is probably the ',lost unpopular month in the British year. Will competitors attempt, for the usual prizes, to show February plausibly in the best...

SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 466: Report by J. M. Cohen The usual prize of six guineas was offered for a translation of Cbassignee.s. sonnet: Malade je couchois sur la chambre...