8 SEPTEMBER 1979

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Sport and politics

The Spectator

So the first acute crisis to confront Mrs Thatcher's Government concerns not the economy, not defence, not even Ulster but whether 15 men may run around various grassy Patches...

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Political commentary

The Spectator

The testament of Dr Marcuse Ferdinand Mount There's no place like a crowded British beach to hear that Herbert Marcuse is dead. How he would have hated the Wall's Cornett()...

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Notebook

The Spectator

Blackpool Having been brought up to believe that unity is one of the great virtues, alongside c leanliness, godliness, thrift and sobriety, I was a little stunned to realise...

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The Zimbabwe jigsaw

The Spectator

Xan Smiley As the Zimbabwe political theatre company prepares to stage its umpteenth Mousetrap-like performance, a musty air of near-comic familiarity, a smell of mocking...

A hundred years ago

The Spectator

The Times' correspondent at Simla draws a depressing picture of AngloIndian morality. He declares that it is much more lax than that of England, and intimates that at Simla the...

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The failure of Raymond Barre

The Spectator

Sam White Paris The third anniversary of Raymond Barre's Prime ministership has come and gone among such wailing and gnashing of teeth t hat it almost amounted to a period of...

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A call to arms

The Spectator

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington 'One should understand that members of the Royal Family, even remote cousins, have always been targets. The big differ ence now is that the IRA...

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Letter from Ulster

The Spectator

Richard West County Down In the Spectator this time last year, I sang the praises of the north Irish coast and in particular of two old-fashioned and friendly hotels in Antrim....

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How to control Ulster

The Spectator

Robin Evelegh The central fact of Northern Ireland is the 'nationhood' of the Protestant people of Ulster. I do not know exactly how to define a 'nation' but, however one does...

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Myth of the hospitable Irish

The Spectator

John Healy This article by John Healy, a regular columnist, appeared in the Irish Times on 1 September, it provoked an angry letter from Mairin Lynch, the wife o fthe Prime...

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Mothers' boys

The Spectator

Christopher Booker Looking back on the state of Britain over this past curious, unhappy decade, one thing may strike us more than anything else — the extraordinary state of the...

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The Berkeley affair

The Spectator

Sir: I will not answer, in detail the tissue of falsehoods about my negotiations with the Nigerian authorities contained in the letter written by Mr Makiwane and Mr Somdaka and...

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The counties

The Spectator

Sir: Christopher Booker's suggestion for the restoration of the old counties (25 August) could not have come at a more auspicious moment. His advocacy of further discussion and...

Containing the IRA

The Spectator

Sir: In your last issue most of the editorial section is devoted to the latest IRA atrocities and the Irish problem: diagnosis aplenty, but little in the way of prescription....

Bloodthirsty

The Spectator

Sir: The return of 'El Cordobes' to the bullring (Notebook 11 August) may have whetted the appetites of bloodthirsty crowds in Spain but it will not impress those who condemn...

Moderate Sir: There is nothing a good Extreme Moderate likes

The Spectator

better than being attacked by a Silly Immoderate — except, perhaps, being attacked by two. So when I discovered that I'd been attacked on the same day by Mr Wheatcroft in the...

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Books

The Spectator

The very fool of Love Michael Foot The Letters of William Hazlitt Edited by Herschel Moreland Sikes assisted by Willard Hallam Bonner & Gerald Lahey (Macmillan El 0) William...

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Historical 'if'

The Spectator

Nicholas Bethell August 1939 Nicholas Fleming (Peter Davies £6.50) The second World war continues to inspire books of 'what would have happened if' historical school. It is...

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Thirtyish

The Spectator

Stephen Koss A Man of the Thirties At Rowse (Weldenfeld £7.95) Munich: The Price of Peace Telford Taylor (Hodder £13.95) The 1930s, if not quite so low and dishonest a decade...

Luckless tribe

The Spectator

Richard West From Our Special Correspondent: Victorian War Correspondents and their Campaigns (Robert Wilkinson-Latham (Hodder £8.95) The Irishman W. H. Russell who covered the...

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Home front

The Spectator

Douglas Johnson British Society and the French Wars 1793-1815 Clive Emsley (Macmillan £8.95; 0.95) Throughout the winter of 1797 to 1798 Bonaparte's army was encamped on the...

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Fanciful

The Spectator

Mary Furness Nancy Cunard Anne Chisholm (Sidgwick £8.50) Nancy Cunard was the volatile, energetic, wilful, notorious, selfish, ambitious (but for what she never seemed quite to...

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Silly cotes

The Spectator

Mirabel Cecil The English Country Cottage R. J. Brown (Hale £6.50). This book fairly rips the roses down from round cottage doors and tears up their crazy Paving paths. It is...

All that jazz

The Spectator

Benny Green Coming Through Slaughter Michael Ondaatje (Marion Boyars E4.95) The crimes against literature perpetrated in the cause of the jazz novel are so grisly that I...

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Arts

The Spectator

Irony and detachment Rodney Milnes Eugene Onegin; The Golden Cockerel; The Turn of the Screw (Edinburgh International Festival) Kent Opera's new Traviata. at Edinburgh struck...

Cinema

The Spectator

Horror-shock Ted Whitehead Allen (Odeon Leicester Square) 'Absolutely no one under the age of 18 will be admitted,' declares the poster for Alien (X). Which seems a pity,...

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Art

The Spectator

!von Hitchens John McEwen The death of Non Hitchens has deprived England of its senior artist of merit — he was 86 — and greatest contemporary landscape painter. More...

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High life

The Spectator

Paradise lost Taki Vouliagmeni This is the plushest resort in Greece. Ten miles east of Athens, it is a complex of bungalows, hotels, restaurants, swimming pools and marinas,...

Low life

The Spectator

Child bride Jeffrey Bernard 'Yet teenage marriages can last' (Radio Times 21 August 1979.) Horace let himself in with his latchkey, walked in to the hall and hung his satchel...

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Last word

The Spectator

Philip Geoffrey Wheatcroft 'The people at the Guardian say that young people nowadays find obituaries boring.' I had asked Philip Hope-Wallace why he had not written anything...

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Chess

The Spectator

Our man in Juan Raymond Keene As acting English delegate to the FIDE congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I found it illuminating to observe the brisk fashion with which the new...