The Chancellor of the Exchequer said at Luxembourg that it would be impossible to guarantee that Britain would be able to bring the pound back to a fixed parity by the end of...

Spectator For a lasting peace, for an Irish democracy When a minority, however poor or small, is sufficiently aggrieved for members of it to take up arms against the existing...

Hugh Macpherson Perhaps the strangest comments to be heard in the Commons this week were the rather plaintive requests from the government backbenches that the Government...

While the trial of Graham Young, the poisoner, progressed, journalists, lawyers, at least two Cabinet Ministers (Mr Maudling and Sir Keith Joseph), officials at the Home Office,...

Heath's betrayal A Conservative Whatever Mr Heath may be doing to exacerbate division within the nation, and whether or not he can successfully defend himself against the...

The pursuit of happiness Patrick Skene Catling Sitting in the lotus position beside the grey waters of an Irish lake, I recently perceived that I had just spun the last trace...

Sunny joys Dennis Hackett The only people in the popular daily field who look forward happily to audited circulation figures are those rapacious labourers on the Sun, for whom...

MR PETER WALKER is showing as sure a political touch as anybody these days. Having kept his head nicely down over nasty economic and industrial troubles, he has popped up to...

Gabriel Pearson on Lawrence as a puritan and messiah As Emile Delavenay's massive critical biography* shows, Lawrence's life-work continually precipitated itself in sudden,...

shows promise Auberon Waugh The Malcontents C. P. Snow (Macmillan £2.25) About a Marriage Giles Gordon (Allison and Busby £2.10) Lord Snow reveals an entirely new talent in...

Robert Blake The Diplomacy of Illusion Keith Middlemas (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.75) There is a mournful fascination about this subject. Although an immense amount has been...

Enoch Powell The Continental Commitment Michael Howard (Temple Smith £2.50) The Collapse of British Power Correlli Barnett (Eyre Methuen e5) " There was in fact a quite...

Bookbuyer There is, as Richard Crossman pointed out last week, a dearth of good political novels in the Disraeli tradition. So Maurice Edel man's excellent Disraeli in Love is...

Patrick Cosgrave I remember sitting once, over a few glasses, with William Whitelaw and about a dozen Tory MPs, mainly of the newer vintage. The Tories were in opposition, and...

Theatre O'Casey, Gorki and Ibsen Kenneth Hurren Hard though it is to believe, the word is that two or three new plays are actually imminent in the West End, but at the time...

Many an old tune Nicholas de Jongh BBC radio's gerontophiliac tendencies have been noticed and deplored in this column before: we had imagined that the public exposure of such...

Grouch() looks back Clive Gammon A dignified set - to (BBC1's own sub-title for Sunday's Omnibus) between Frank Muir and Julius, i.e. Groucho, Marx was what I'd looked forward...

The old question of whether the theatre critics of daily newspapers should have to write their reviews more of less off-thecuff to catch the next day's editions, like reporters...

Spot the lady Rodney Milnes One of the lasting fascinations of Verdi's Macbeth is the way in which the thirtytwo-year-old composer managed to deliver all the goods expected...

Family gardens Mark Le Fanu It's less than a year since Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist came to London and had such a marked critical success here. Bertolucci is a poet...

First-class game Benny Green The presence in England of an Australian touring side, with all its built-in evocation of nostalgia for past touring sides, puts back yet again...

Garden visit Peter Quince This is the high season for visiting other people's gardens, even in such a summer as this. If one is on the receiving end of a visit, the experience...

Fishy business Pamela Vandyke Price Having recently passed from one element t) another by putting on a mask and snorkel, I now tend to appraise the whole world as potential...

The floating pound Sir: Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the issue it appears possible that the pound will be allowed to float forever. That your journal has came...

Sir: The present plans of the Inner London Education Authority for 11plus transfer, conflict with section 76 of the Education Act, 1944, which states that 'local education...

London is in the private sector. Exploitation of such property is rife and social needs are disregarded. Mr Peter Walker has proposed action against empty office blocks....

the, In many ways more important, issue of what is happening to the residents of Central London. In the City of Westminster, the Population is falling by 6,000 a Year. The...

congratulation on your anti-Common Market article (June 17). In my opinion it was quite excellent. I believe that from now on events will take charge of the situation. The...

Bennett Sir: We are not going into Europe. We are British. D. C. T. Bennett Blackbushe Airport, Surrey Sir: A Conservative has been defined as a member of a political party...

Sir: I have followed the correspondence on the late Duke of Windsor and cannot help but notice that one most important point has been missed. The Queen Mother must have very...

Sir: It will be a disaster if Senator McGovern becomes President of the United States, even more so if Senator Edward Kennedy were his running mate. One must always remember...

Sir: I read with amused interest the letter of recent date in The Spectator of June 24 with respect to my letter commenting upon the unfolding Romanoff story. Messrs Antony...

Sir: Regarding Mr Patrick Cosgrave's profile of Enoch Powell (June 24) there is a well-known and experienced Fleet Street journalist called Mr Fergus Cashin, but to the best of...

Sir: As a Spectator reader of old I found your article 'Post Mortem of Angela Davis ' (June 17) emptily superficial and devoid of any distinction of thought. It was loosely...

Sir: Editing, as you do, a periodical which internationally sets Olympian standards in its use of English, how can you suffer the appalling number of typographical errors which...

Sir: Professor Spender, in the postscript to his review of Professor Bell's Life of Virginia Woolf (June 17), makes a snide reference to 'the misprints in this volume.' May I...

Dear Mrs Pamela Vandyke Price: I should like to tell you of a recurring day-nightmare I have. Telephone rings. A friend's voice says: "Halle Julian ,I'm bringing Elizabeth...

How weak is sterling? Nicholas Davenport My parting words last week — don't sell the gilt-edged market — were prompted by Information I had received of Bank of Eng land...

With inflation running unchecked it is about time the Department of National Savings suspended the activities of that army 'of workers (many paid with nothing more than an MBE...

Companies in the asset stripping game are finding it better to have rights issues than to trouble with bidding for companies and actually selling the assets at present share...

The indications are that the impetuous Mr Christopher Chataway, Minister for Industrial Development, is throwing good money after bad in giving ICL a further £14.2 million as a...

One of the pleasures in reading of Jim Slater's gambit in offering £50,000 which has resulted in Bobby Fischer being persuaded to meet Boris Spassky in Iceland for the world...

Sponsoring horse races is a highly chancey business: the stakes are high and there's no cast iron recipe for success. Take last Satur day, when Newbury in summertime appeared...

Fags, food and peanuts John Bull It is not necessary to smoke yourself to death in order to keep up the demand for cigarettes: there are plenty of fools around, suffering from...

Oil in them thar seas Nephew Wilde It sometimes pays to keep quiet about one's whereabouts. I knew one chap, for instance, with a cloak-anddagger type imagination, who always...

Something positive to believe Margaret Thatcher talks Do you think of yourself as a bricks and mortar minister? I certainly think of myself as having to carry out the...

Deprived cycle Jef Smith Sir Keith Joseph has now declared himself in public on a topic which has fascinated him privately since he took responsibility for the personal social...

The case of Janice custos Seven years ago Janice was badly burned. At first her local hospital told her not to worry; they would attempt a skin graft. The graft didn't take,...

John Rowan Wilson One of the greatest problems about cancer lies in its variability. Since cancer cells are not invaders from without but rogue cells Within the patient's body,...