Britain is Working. Mr Tony Blair celebrated the seventh anniversary of his becoming prime minister even more quietly than Lady Thatcher celebrated the 25th anniversary of her...

and narrow-minded innkeeper, who simply cannot be bothered to find room beneath his roof for the many people waiting outside who need shelter. The President of the European...

Saturday. Although the day was muggy and storms had been forecast, I am sorry to say that there was no thunder and lightening. Like Hector Berlioz recalling the circumstances of...

T here is a substantial monograph to be written on the relationship between the Prime Minister and Margaret Thatcher. It began with abject, one-sided adoration. Colleagues...

unfairly discrediting an opponent, I tend to be very sceptical of them, but cannot avoid feeling that antiSemitism is in the air. The form it commonly takes at present was...

Bruce Anderson says that the scandalous events of the past week show that the Arabs can take brutality — but not from American women A nyone who wants to understand the peoples...

'Yes, the post never comes till two now,' said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn't been listening to what I'd been saying, and by implication that what I had been...

The war has descended into chaos, says Julian Manyon. And whereas in Vietnam there was strong local support for the Americans, there is none in Iraq Baghdad A s Iraq burns, Paul...

Rachel Johnson says that — irony, irony — a new version of The Stepford Wives is being released at a time when women are once again baking cherry pies and standing by their men...

Peter Hitchens says that both Left and Right felt unspeakably smug during the years of protest. But now that communism and apartheid have collapsed, the world is hardly a better...

A weekly survey of world restrictions on freedom and free trade The European Union's social chapter has been so successful in suppressing economic growth in Europe that it is no...

Daniel Hannan on how the police seized the computer and files of a German journalist for the 'crime' of investigating an EU financial scandal Brussels T ony Blair's referendum...

The burger classes are costing us a fortune in health charges, says Toby Church. It would save money if the state were to whip them into shape T he nanny state is about to show...

Lloyd Evans examines the rhetoric of the anti-war poets and playwrights and finds that the voice of dissent has faded into torpor and complacency p oetry and conflict are as...

I n May our thoughts turn to southern France in summer: roasting heat relieved by light breezes across the dry and herby land. Cicadas are chirping, tiny lizards scuttle across...

A re the Daily Mirror's torture pictures fakes? Most of my friends, whether anti-war or pro-war, think that they probably are. Such is my own inclination. But let us for a...

From Guy Herbert Sir: Alan Dershowitz's own views (Letters, 1 May) are scarier than those attributed to him by Paul Robinson. Professor Dershowitz appears to be saying that...

From Nigel Famdale Sir: Frank Johnson, in his otherwise astute article on Iraq, argues that only the Left believes in going to war against horrible regimes that do not threaten...

From John Hayes MP Sir: John Prescott, in his prickly response to Rod Liddle (Letters, 10 April), repeats the government's standard defence of its unpleasant neglect of...

From Peter Knight Sir: I was sorry to read of your contributor Harry Mount's apprehension that he might not remember sufficient Latin to satisfy the Oxford examiners (Letters,...

Mount — indeed, in my experience, one is far more likely to find good Latin being written on the Net than in most British Classics departments. The 'Grex Latine loquentium'...

From Christopher Booker Sir: With respect to my editor, Dominic Lawson, I fear that both he And Matthew Parris are missing the point of vitamin supplements and herbal...

From Stephen Mendes Sir: David Lovibond is wrong to claim that 'the burgeoning ethnic minorities cleave to their languages, dress, way of life and, most importantly, their...

From Paul Stock Sir: Peter Oborne is mistaken (Politics, 1 May). It is Wile E. Coyote who always succumbs to the force of gravity, not Bugs Bunny. Wile is a much more apposite...

From Joan Adamson Sir: Ross Clark (Globophobia, 17 April) asks whether the descendants of African slaves bringing lawsuits against Lloyd's of London and others would rather be...

From Dermot Scott Sir: Your leading article (It's about democracy'. 24 April) wrongly suggests that MEPs 'do not have the direct power to reject legislation that is enjoyed by...

From Robert Duffield Sir: Jeremy Clarke's boy's maternal grandfather's belief that keeping goats tends to make people either cynical or pugnacious certainly has ancient roots...

From Edward Collier Sir: Phil Wyness (Letters, 1 May) writes that 'since the introduction of the Abortion Law Reform Act of 1967, the state has conspired in the destruction of...

From J.M.E. Took Sir: Paul Johnson (And another thing, 17 April) has got his lingo mixed up. *Go and take a shufti' belonged to the army in Egypt, never in India, where one went...

I must have vomited,' said my youngish taxi-driver, narrowing his eyes and making a mental calculation as he overtook a Sainsbury's lorry at 80 mph on the winding death run of...

New South Wales T he name of the station seemed to ring a bell. An hour or so south of Sydney, and through the window of my double-decker Australian railway carriage, I could...

Two lists of Top Tens I n his new short life of F.D. Roosevelt, the late Roy Jenkins put him in the top three to have held the US presidency, alongside Washington and Lincoln....

Philip Hensher HOME: THE STORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED IN OUR HOUSE by Julie Myerson Flamingo, £20, pp. 451, ISBN 0067148224 J 'm not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or...

Miranda France PORT MUNGO by Patrick McGrath Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 241, ISBN 0747570191 W hen I interviewed him about his novel Asylum, Patrick McGrath described himself as a...

Diana Hendry NEW COLLECTED POEMS by W. S. Graham Faber, £25, pp. 387, ISBN 0571210155 I could tell you about Graham the man, the hard-drinking, wild and wayward Scots poet who...

Raymond Carr AUTHORS TAKE SIDES ON IRAQ AND THE GULF WAR edited by Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf Cecil Woolf, £9.95 (pbk), pp. 182, ISBN 1897967438 I n June 1937, Nancy...

Robert Edric BETRAYAL IN NAPLES by Neil Griffiths Viking, .£9.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0670914606 F irst the improbables and implausibles (and I give nothing away here: the publishers...

Ray Monk EDWARD TELLER: THE REAL DR STRANGELOVE by Peter Goodchild Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 352, ISBN 0297607340 I do really feel it would have been a better world without...

Katherine Duncan-Jones LOOKING FOR SEX IN SHAKESPEARE by Stanley Wells Cambridge Universily Press, £10.95, pp. 111, ISBN 0521540399 1 n this slim book, based on three...

Elisa Segrave GEORGE AND SAM by Charlotte Moore, with an introduction by Nick Hornby Viking, £16.99, pp. 252, ISBN 067091441X 1 n this fascinating book about her two autistic...

Carole Angier AMONG WOMEN ONLY by Cesare Pavese Peter Owen, 0.95, pp. 198, ISBN 0720612144 A mong the Italian writers we know, a remarkable number are connected to Piedmont and...

Kate Hoey THE PERFECT MILE by Neal Bascomb HarperCollins Willow, £16.99, pp. 384, ISBN 0007173733 3:59:4: THE QUEST TO BREAK THE FOUR-MINUTE MILE by John Bryant Hutchinson,...

P. J. Kavanagh NEWS FROM SOMEWHERE: ON SETTLING by Roger Scruton Continuum, £16.99, pp. 177, ISBN 0826469302 T' e subtitle, 'On Settling', is apt; the book is about the author's...

Adam Zamoyski CELESTIAL HARMONIES by Peter Esterhazy, translated by Judith Sollosy Flamingo, 00, pp. 846, ISBN 0007141475 T his is a very unusual book and a remarkable one, a...

John de Falbe SNOW by Orhan Pamuk Faber, £16.99, pp. 436, ISBN 057121830X 1 n 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey's north-eastern frontier, as part of a...

Henry Hobhouse TALES OF THE ROSE TREE: RAVISHING RHODODENDRONS AND THEIR TRAVELS AROUND THE WORLD by Jane Brown HarperCollins, £20, pp. 308, ISBN 0007129955 D o not be put off...

Francis King STEPHEN SPENDER: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY by John Sutherland Viking, £25, pp. 627, ISBN 0670883034 I n the second paragraph of this biography, John Sutherland...

Richard West J ames Joyce scholars and the Irish tourist industry are both gearing up for 16 June, the centenary of the day on which Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, set out...

Andrew Lambirth talks to John Craxton about the recreation of his designs for Daphnis and Chloe J ohn Craxton (born 1922) is ..t painter who has spent much of his life in...

Tom Rosenthal Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261-1557 Metropolitan Museum, New York until 4 July phis exhibition of Byzantine art is the third in a trilogy of broad, sweeping,...

Tanya Harrod M ngei was a neologism coined in 1925 by the Japanese philosopher and art critic Yanagi Soetsu and his two potter friends Kanjiro Kawai and Hamada Shoji to...

Marcus Berkmann I n the 273 years I have been writing this column, absolutely no one at all has ever asked me why it's 'Pop music' and not 'Rock music' or just 'Pop' or 'Rock'...

Michael Tanner The Rape of Lucretia Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House Q f all Britten's stage works (not including the dreaded church parables), I have found The Rape of...

Lloyd Evans Hamlet Old Vie H amlet: boy or man? Boy, insists Trevor Nunn, casting a stripling in his new production at the Old Vic. I won't dispute Nunn's thesis. The play...

Mark Amory Van Helsing PG-13, selected cinemas A lynch mob curls its way up the winding path to an impossibly turreted castle, each misshapen peasant carrying a torch aloft...

Simon Hoggart T don't suppose that Peter Ackroyd's 1 London — Fire & Destiny (BBC2) was meant to be quite as funny ha-ha or as funny peculiar as it turned out to be. Mr...

Michael Vestey I 've never particularly liked athletics, but the breaking of the four-minute mile by Roger Bannister on 6 May 1954 retains a unique hold on the imagination. It...

Robin Oakley A s the string of brightly garbed riders in one recent Tour de France swept through a mountainside village, faces grim with concentration, knees pumping up to the...

Taki I remember 7 May 1954 very clearly, despite the 50 years that have since passed by. The chaplain at my American boarding school, Dr Gould, opened the dinner prayer by...

Jeremy Clarke personally, unlike some, I've nothing 1 against the holidaymakers who flock to this part of the world as soon as the primroses are out. They liven up the place....

Petronella Wyatt W hat shocked me so unutterably about those pictures of US soldiers was the photograph of a member of my sex dangling a cigarette in her mouth and pointing...

healthy (or so they say) and you can't move for TV commercials and billboards and bus ads showing nice, white, fitlooking, professional-looking women with good teeth and...

FRANK KEATING T ime was called on Willie last week. The final whistle, 'stumps' and close of play. Willie Watson was 84. His death means membership of that supreme corps...

few days in France has told me I can get a lift in the plane of one of the other guests. I am a nervous flyer at the best of times and particularly nervous at the thought that...

which he bares his teeth. It started as a joke — we all screamed because he looked so hideous; now it has almost turned into an involuntary facial tic. When other people are...

is totally unpredictable. Friends coming to stay get annoyed with us if we advise them to bring anoraks and Barbours on the moor and then they don't need them and get hot and...