The Labour Party has come out of its Blackpool conference very much stronger than it went into it; and this is chiefly due to Mr Harold Wilson. The carping critics who have been...

When, in February 1968, at the. behest of the Conservative Shadow Cabinet, a Labour government decided to restrict and control the entry into this country of British citizens,...

Humphrey Bogart and the Labour Party Patrick Cosgrave All conferences — of whichever party — are about power; and only incidentally about other things, like policies, or...

PUZZLE AWOKE the other day from that sleep imposed on him by the parliamentary recess and went boldly north to Blackpool. He had dinner with John Silkin, Harold Wilson's former...

A brief Rumanian encounter in early summer assisted Harold Wilson to defeat Hugh Scanlon's engineering workers' union's resolution seeking to commit the Labour Party to outright...

The people and the war Henry Fairlie The war in Vietnam is not really an issue in this election, and in so far as it is an issue it is Richard Nixon who is reaping the...

Who's spying on whom? Olga Franklin Are the Russians spies? Well, yes. So are we, I hope. If not, we're certainly not doing a job. It's hard to tell what Lord Franks really...

Tampering with time Oliver Stewart Time is short before the date by which all member countries of the European Economic Community must go over to the international system of...

By 1944 Allied victory against th.e Axis was a certainty. If some prophet had at that time correctly predicted the nature of the world ten years later, he would have been...

Auberon Waugh Night Edna O'Brien (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.00) August 1914 Alexander Solzhenitzyn (Bodley Head £3.00) For my own part, I simply do not believe that even in...

Charles Rycroft Freud edited by Jonathan Miller (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £3.75) Freud once remarked, one hopes jocularly, that psychoanalysis would only have arrived when shops...

Alastair Buchan Things to Come: Thinking about the 70's and 80's by Herman Kahn and B. BruceBriggs (Macmillan £3.00) The future, as Theodore Roosevelt said seventy years ago,...

Beverley Nichols Escape from the Shadows Robin Maugham (Hodder & Stoughton, £3.50) "All of us," observes Somerset Maugham "have crossed thesholds of which we do not boast."...

Rayner Heppenstall The Case of Mary Bell Gitta Sereny (Eyre Methuen £2.75) In December 1968, at Newcastle assizes, Mary Flora Bell, then aged eleven, was found guilty of the...

Patrick Reilly The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (VVeidenfeld and Nicolson £4.50) Lord Gladwyn, biding his time before publishing the memoirs of a brilliant diplomatic career, has...

Clive Wilmer Dr Faust's Sea-Spiral. Spirit Peter Redgrove (Routledge and Kegan Paul. £1.50) The Holly Queen Sally Purcell (Anvil £1.25) Double Flute Richard Burns (Enitharmon...

The evening star trembling in blue light The red star breaking through the dusk like acetylene The Orion stars blossoming like desert flowers Even the pleiads sharply visible...

The sky is tin, the street is tin, and now A tin man, red and yellow walking as a spring unwinds. His two halves do not fit exactly but He perseveres, and finds a house of tin...

Philip Conford Order of Assassins Colin Wilson (Rupert Hart-Davis £2.25) I suspect that Cohn Wilson has a vast commonplace book, full of cuttings, quotations and information...

Bookbuyer In the wake of the Longford Report, there has been a scattering of prosecutions, police actions and various other forms of censorship which add up, in the...

Adam von Trott, Oxford, America and the anti-Nazis Lionel Gelber Adam von Trott, a conspirator against Hitler, undertook a transatlantic visit at the dawn of World War II...

Television Hooked by the Rostov Saga Clive Gammon Not being of the War and Peace generation, that is to say of the age-group which passed, away the long hours of airraid...

Blood will out Christopher Hudson If vampire films are to survive they will clearly need an infusion of blood. Since The Vampire Lovers, released about eighteen months ago,...

Sound if not sight Rodney Milnes Because it fails to fit in with received ideas of how opera should be structured — through-composed and largely corntemplative — Weber's and...

Frying tonight Kenneth Hurren Watching indifferent performances of wellmeaning plays by embryonic dramatists in dank cellars, converted (but not too converted) warehouses and...

Burst of gory Evan Anthony If you were one of those who prayed for Rosemary's baby a few years back and have been wondering ever since how the poor kid turned out, but lacked...

'Marie' Benny Green Matilda Alice Victoria Wood, alias Marie Lloyd, died fifty years ago this weekend , and the most impressive of all the testimonies to her greatness is that...

My congratulations to the Sunday Times' drama critic, Harold Hobson, for his neat feat in writing a 1,200-word feature piece last Sunday, benignly chiding dramatists who can't...

Sir: Referring to Bookend's comments (is Bookend female?) on women in publishing (Spectator, September 16), I would like to state that two key people in my publishing house are...

I have only to turn my back for a few days and some mischievious ruffian is rummaging in the treasure trove. It's as well he burnt his fingers as a nonchalant touch of genius...

Sir: Mr Milnes (Spectator, September 16) says that during the Allegretto of Dvorak's eighth syMphony, he saw Karajan bring in the cor anglais with his right hand. Unfortunately,...

Nicholas Davenport The amazing £2 ballon d'essai flown by the Government in furtherance of its antiinflation crusade could only have been conceived at one of the many convivial...

My instinct, if I were a P & 0 shareholder suffering probably from merger shock, would be to reject the Board's advice unless Bovis increase their offer. The deal is obviously...

It's people what count Nephew Wilde One day at Ascot many years ago Aunt Maud who had dropped a few pounds in the first race surreptitiously made her way behind the jockeys'...

Off the hard stuff John Bull In my opinion the only shares to go for at the moment, taking a longish-term view are blue chip companies where ratings are not discounting the...

Michael Meacher One murky corner of social policy is the massive failure of the unemployed to get the benefit rights for which they have paid compulsory national insurance...

Planners plan Jef Smith Each year for a period around the end of December and another about the end of March, directors of social services, or more often their research...

Drug resistance Bernard Dixon The American investor's weekly Baron's has just launched an extraordinarily vicious attack on the US Food and Drug Administration for its recent...

Vanishing hares Peter Quince )11 my recent walks around the stubble ields (now fast disappearing under the )lough) I have been struck by the total tbsence of hares. Usually we...