In England it is our custom to avoid theory. Philosophical and political arguments are conducted in pragmatic terms. This empirical tradition has much to be said for it....

The boycott and the bomb Ferdinand Mount There was an unholy excitement about the night — six and a half hours of thrills and spills, ferociously tense from first to last. The...

Ho! Ho! Ho! Off to the polls we go. The Government went out in a blaze of dishonour. The Prime Minister, who appears never to have noticed his predecessor's final honours' list,...

Auberon Waugh I have a younger brother called Septimus to whom I am devoted, my Pride and my Hope. About ten years ago he was staying with us in France and on the point of...

Victoria Schofield Islamabad As Zulfikar All Bhutto mounted the gallovvs no-one could know what last thoughts Occupied an undoubtedly great mind which for so long had been...

Xan Smiley Windhoek Where does the laager begin? Some South African pundits point to the Caprivi Strip, wondrous in shape as in name, where Namibia's north-eastern prong juts...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington The small, steamy puffs of radioactivity intermittently 'vented' from the crippled atomic electric generator at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania,...

Sam White Paris Paris had never seen anything quite like it: policemen not only disguised as potential rioters but behaving as such, while some of their colleagues dressed in...

Vernon Bogdanor With unemployment having doubled since 1974, and production only marginally higher than during the three-day week, government-industry relationships are bound...

The Chancellor of the Exchequer brought forward his Budget on Thursday night, in a speech received with a good deal of derision by the House. When some one from outside asked at...

Patrick Cosgrave In November 1978, in a tatty bookshop in Battersea, I bought a copy of one of Airey Neave's books. It was called Little Cyclone, and told the story of a young...

Richard West This is the first of three articles by Richard West on Trollope's political England. The career of Phineas Finn in Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels is not only...

Patrick Mam ham Newspaper proprietors are businessmen who want to feel more important, That, writes Simon Jenkins who was recently fired by one of them, is the basic reason for...

Nicholas Davenport A volatile equity market seems to be ordained for the election — up and down with the opinion polls — and it would indeed be embarrassing for the Tories if...

Sir: It is said that Himmler used to shed a tear whenever one of his pet birds would suffer an injury, but naturally he did not mind at all butchering thousands of people 'for a...

Sir: It is not surprising that Mr Heath, a veteran politician and pro-Marketeer, should blame Britain's difficulties with the other EEC countries on its poor economic...

Sir: Edward Mortimer (Letters, 24 March) may indeed be right when he says that the Times dispute has been caused by the failure of management to deal directly with its shop...

Sir: Since Hans Keller challenged readers to think of a dozen great E major works, perhaps you could find space for the following baker's dozen of examples that have occurred to...

Sir: In the course of an article which contains some flattering remarks about myself, Hans Keller invites any reader to think of a dozen great E major works whereupon he will,...

Sir: Jam currently preparing a biography of Sir Neville Cardus which is to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1981. At present, I am particularly interested in Sir...

Sir: Your correspondent Mr David M Jacobs (Letters, 24 March) does scant justice to the true nature of the Middle East conflict. This had very little to do with Islam or 'Moslem...

Sir: As a sufferer from cancer myself,. I should like to question two points in Ehs: abeth Whipp's review of Susan Sontag s book Illness as Metaphor (17 March). First , it...

Sir: I would like to compliment Alexand er Chancellor on his Indian Notebooks (I ° and 17 March). His miscellany provides a delightful treat, and its sweep, for a visitor in a...

Murray Sayle In Search of History: A Personal Adventure Theodore H. White (Cape E6.50) The great thing about the newspaper business, as Walter Winchell used to say, is that You...

Alan Watkins The Crossman Diaries: Selections from the Diaries of a Cabinet Minister 1964-70 Introduced and edited by Anthony Howard (Hamish Hamilton and Cape £8.95; Magnum...

Robert Skidelsky Getting from Here to There: A Policy for the Post-Keynesian Age W.W. Rostow (Macmillan 27.95) In the past few years, many of the conditions which, since 1945,...

Paul Ableman Byzantine Honeymoon Philip Glazebrook (Gollancz £5.95) There are certain words so irredeemably 'poetic' that their early occurrence in a narrative is enough to...

Hans Keller Ori Thursday 12 April at 8.30, the first complete production of Berg's 'Lulu' )vill be simultaneously broadcast on Radio 3 and BBC2. A curse has been hovering over...

Rodney Milnes The Jacobin (Chelsea Opera Group) Fennimore and Gorda and Mavra (Park Lane Opera) Of the three out of Dvorak's ten operas that I know, each contains enough...

John McEwen With the spring season now fully upon us new shows are almost as numerous as flowering daffodils, but the pick of this week's bunch has to be the double-bill of...

Ted Whitehead Fantasia (Odeon Haymarket) Quite definitely the highest form of cinematographic art imaginable. A multiplane spiritual anabasis in the filmic métier, uniting for...

Peter Jenkins Cloud Nine (Royal Court) Joint Stock starts with the acting. The style has become established, almost stylised, but is still quite different to what most theatre...

Richard ingrams the play takes place in Africa at the time of Livingstone and Stanley and Part Two in Britain following the publication of the Hite report. We see the same...

Taki New York In the summer of 1963 Henry Ford II arrived in the South of France on board his newly built yacht, the Santa Maria. He was a ccompanied by his wife of 20 years,...

Jeffrey Bernard Mr Charles Greville, who achieved a sort of fleeting immortality because of his diary, had a contempt for ordinary people — the Plebs — that bordered on the...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft The wise scribbler soon learns what not to write about. These may seem to compose a disparate group: fluoridation of the water supply. Jews'n 'Arabs (more...

No.1059: Opinionated Set by Robert Baird : Jane Austen, as we know from her letters, held strong views on the place of women in society. How woul d she have reacted to the idea...

David Levy On 27 March I had the thrilling experience of watching my wife give birth to our first child, and during the first few days that followed I reflected on what life...