The Pope's Irish trip was stupendous. Even if nothing comes of it and Ireland resumes its ways unaffected by the experience, the memory will persist of an amazing expression of...

Ferdinand Mount Brighton The man on the Guardian night news desk immediately recognised the familiar treacly voice, at once genial and threatening. 'If you must write these...

Brighton Max Beerbohm once began a review of Hamlet, 'And so once again the battlements of Elsinore loom into view. Heigh ho: And so once again the platform at Brighton Centre...

Auberon Waugh They say it is the cruellest thing you can do to a pit pony if you take it to the surface and show it the sky, the sun and the fields. After six years of writing...

Patrick Marnham Dublin People were still trying to leave Phoenix Park six hours after the Pope had gone to Drogheda. Many of those at Drogheda did not get back to Belfast till...

Henry Fairlie Washington It has long been my belief that if the Roman Catholic Church still cared to protect the secular power, it would have removed Edward Kennedy from the...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington Whatever was intended when Senator Frank Church was given permission to make the announcement about Russian troops in Cuba, the whole affair has...

Xan Smiley The Fijians may come to Zero. The announcement sounds absurd, but fits nicely into the Lancaster House game of riddles. The sunny-tempered, even-handed, sporting...

The Bishop of Manchester has made an original speech on the Burial question. He rose altogether out of trivialities about rights of interment, and asked whether interment could...

Tim Garton Ash Budapest The uniformed doorman at the 'Hungaria', the grandest restaurant in Hungary, was apologetic, He was sorry not to be able to offer me a table, but the...

Mary Kenny When I gave birth to my first child, I was a staff writer for the London Evening Stan dard, and I took five months off work to have the baby. During that time,...

Tim Congdon Mr Healey is a perceptive politician. He knows that, although the Labour Party may not be united on what it agrees about, it is united on what it disagrees with. As...

Sir: Mr Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in his review of Max Hastings's book, Bomber Command (29 September), would have us shed tears over the Allied 'crime' in devastating German cities...

Sir: You may be aware of the formation of The Airey Neave Memorial Trust, under the sponsorship of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, the Prime Minister, Mr...

week Geoffrey Wheatcroft Says so many things which are incorrect in s ubstance or by implication that I am at a . loss to know which one to shoot at, rather like Battle of...

Sir:Auberon Waugh admirably summarises (15 September) the weaknesses of Collins English Dictionary (which only supplies sloppy modern usage) and the Oxford (which does not give...

Sir: It would be churlish to cavil at Auberon Waugh's review of dictionanes, with its generous praise of our own ephemeral effort. All the same, I cannot suppress a nagging...

Sir: While I applaud Mr Congdon's aim in wishing to see a reduction in the Govern ment's borrowing requirements (8 September), I think that he is mistaken in believing that any...

Christopher Booker So many letters have poured into the Spectator offices in the past few weeks, following my article 'Restoration of the old counties', that I must apologise...

Ferdinand Mount 'Too remote? No, I don't think there's any danger of that.' The Minister sounded puzzled by the suggestion, as though the possibility were itself too remote to...

Richard West When I worked as a reporter in Yorkshire more than 20 years ago, it was customary, if one was doing a local government story, to call on the Clerk to the Council...

Who took away our counties So rolling, wild and wide, And called them after posh hotels, Thamesdown and Humberside? And where on earth is Avon? Can it be holding yet The lovely...

Michael Wharton 'Retain your Loyalty; Preserve your Rights': these are the words inscribed on the old High Cross in front of the Castle gates at the upper end of the wide main...

The delegates to next week's Conservative Party Conference at Blackpool will include a great many people who would probably be by no means unsympathetic to the general tenor of...

Alex de Jonge The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940-1971 Ed. Simon Karlinsky (Weldonfeld £12.50) Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute Ed. Peter Ouennell (Weidenfeld E6.95) I have always found...

John Biggs-Davison The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government In Northern Ireland 1921-39 Patrick Buckland (Gill & MacMillan £13) 'The six counties were hardly handed over...

Benny Green Sherlock Holmes: thoMan and his World H.R.F. Keating (Thames and Hudson £5.50) By far the most revealing thing about this latest biography of Sherlock Holmes is...

A.N. Wilson The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1932-1935 Ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth £12.50) Letters not addressed to oneself are...

Francis King The Skaters' Waltz Philip Norman (Hamish Hamilton £5.95) Carrying an epigraph from Baudelaire, 'PM plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mule ans', this book...

(Collins £4.50) Penelope Fitzgerald prefaces her new novel about houseboat-dwellers on the Thames with a slyly apposite quotation from Dante; it comes from the point where Dante...

Hans Keller I 3 eethoven's Ninth will be heard under Solti in a live relay from Chicago next Wednesday (October 12) at 8 p.m, on Radio 3. An article on the Ninth at this point...

Rodney Milnes Aida (Coliseum) Orontes (Riverside Studios) The last new production of Aida in London was 11 years ago at the Royal Opera. It cost around £80,000, which was...

Peter Jenkins Ecstasy (Hampstead) Men's Beano (RSC, Warehouse) The Passing Out Parade (Greenwich) Somebody once said that art consisted in leaving things out, or something like...

John McEwen The unenviable lot of the successful middle-aged artist is that ordeal by fire, the mid-career retrospective. Currently it is the turn of John Hoyland (Serpentine...

Ted Whitehead Woyzeck (Paris Pullman) Buchner's Woyzeck (AA) is astonishingly modern for a play written in I 836, resembl ing in its form and tone the work of today's younger...

Richard Ingrams After months of sloth and ineptitude the BBC has at last been showing some signs of life. A whole host of new programmes was launched last week and I even found...

Taki Peregrine Worsthorne once defended gossip in the Spectator's Notebook by pointing out that recounting gossip, and describing salon life, seemed far more socially relevant...

Jeffrey Bernard I returned to Soho this week after 18 months of self-imposed exile to bless what is left of my pathetically sheep-like flock. Frank Blake is still descending...

David Levy After his magnificent result in Montreal earlier in the year, it comes as no surprise that Mikhail Tal has scored an outstand ing victory in the Riga Interzonal...