THE SPECTATOR --------- CONTAINING IRAN IN OUR last issue we suggested that the f-_ . I. time might come when even the British, oyal as they normally are and should be to the...

HURD STALLS ON 23 JULY a delegation led by Cardinal H1urme visited the Home Secretaryd Mr °Uglas Hurd. The delegation discussed With him the cases of those imprisoned for the...

P O L I T I C S America up the Gulf without a paddle MA RTIN IVENS 'The soldiers who are ordered to their deaths have a right to a plan as well as to a cause,' declared...

Incoherent Sir: The omission of a line from my review of the Ravel double bill at Glyndebourne must have made me sound incoherent as well as bad-tempered. The fourth paragraph...

Silly Billy Sir: You were taken in by Bill (William?) I Wells of Cambridge (Letters, 1 August). I bet he's the sort of patronising middle-class twit that comes to 95 per cent...

Sir: I feel so sorry for your correspondent, I Bill Wells (Letters, 1 August). I am an OAP living on considerably less than f75 a week. A generous and thoughtful friend gave me...

Wanted for murder Sir: Magnus Linklater in 'The death of my paper' (1 August) quotes one of the sports journalists on the London Daily News as saying that 'the operation was a...

Stones of Athens Sir: Your reviewer Mr Noel Malcolm (Books, 1 August) is a difficult man to please. When I say that two whole chapters of my book on the Elgin marbles are in...

Innocent soldiers Sir: Hermione Goulding (Letters 25 July) regards anyone who joins up without being prepared 'to die should it be required of them' as innocent 'only in the...

L E T T E R S Converted village Sir: Lest you think that you are being. singled out for the full weight of British Telecom ineptitude at the Holborn exchange, I can assure you...

B O OKS Making a meal of it Eric Christiansen THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM by Judith Herrin Basil Blackwell, f29.50 T here are various ways of writing the history of Europe...

Five go on an adventure Anne Chisholm SAVAGES by Shirley Conran Sidgwick & Jackson, f12.95 If Shirley Conran did not herself invent what is now referred to in publishing...

Connie get your gun Stan Gebler Davies TERRIBLE BEAUTY: A LIFE OF CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ by Diana Norman I ON- Hodder & Stoughton, £14.95 M adame de Markievicz was by far the...

Upper classes have still the upper hand Anthony Blond THE ARISTOCRACY OF ENGLAND 1660-1914 by J. V. Beckett Blackwell, £14.95 How has our aristocracy managed so well? Just...

The American way of art Duncan Fallowell UNDERSTANDING TOSCANINI by Joseph Horowitz Faber, £20 This book is not a biography of Toscanini but is about Toscanini in America....

Sentenced to life Jim McCue A my Clampitt's 'Man Feeding Pigeons' poems are about 'one man and one occasion, on a street in Manhattan', but to unravel her 'inkling/of the...

Man Feeding Pigeons: II Through the byways of whatever imperative he would have arrived to summon this seedily bobbing assemblage on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it can...

Man Feeding Pigeons: I It was the form of the thing, the unmanaged symmetry of it, of whatever it was he convoked as he knelt on the sidewalk and laid out from his unfastened...

Music Disc jockeying Peter Phillips Since July and August are traditionally the months when no one seems to buy or listen to classical records, or even read magazines which...

Radio Cabbage-whites and kings Noel Malcolm It has been a dull month on Radio 4, as the schedules gradually settle down for their summer hibernation. (The technical term for...

Home life Sleeping sickness Alice Thomas Ellis This is going to be awfully boring. You know what mothers say - only boring people are ever bored. Don't believe it. I'm sure...

A =-7 c-- a i Cold comfort | a ~ mhk I z, I i I AM writing from Cumberland, where the sauce does not come from, just outside Cockermouth, gazing across billiard-green lawns...