Company Notes By CUSTOS STORE SHARE DIVIDENDS. At the beginning of the week the boom in store shares gathered pace with the stimulus of the Great Universal Stores bonus and...

FINANCE AND INVESTMENT By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT I LIKE to imagine that the readers of this page arc divided into two groups-the inqWsitive atid acquisitive. The first are the...

CINEMA Rome, Eleven O'Clock. (Studio One.)Glinka. (Continentale.) Tinl nicest thing about the two films I review this weck is that they are both shown on old-fatshioned...

THEATRE Romeo and Juliet. By William Shakespeare. (Guildford Repertory.) Four Winds. By Alex Atkinson. (Phoenix.) PROBABLY there never has been a period when Repertory was not...

Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Picture Gallery and Museum: Stratford-uponAvon. DRAMA has never inspired anything very much from the painter. So it is not surprising to find that...

BALLET (arle Blanche. (Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet.) Carte Blanche illustrates the dangerous element in Walter Gore's choreography, which is an aptitude to underexplore...

Roasted Pigeons Last week we sat down to roasted pigeons garnished with strips of bacon. Ihey were a moulh-watering sight and as plump as only autumn pigeons can be. One...

Sugar and Wine Sugar is derationed and since the news was given I have thought about brewing a crock of wine. The elderberries are ready for picking and, in fact, they will...

Country Life Tiir evening sun was low and, travelling an undulating road, it was often in my eyes and so brilliant that I could hardly see where I was going. When I looked at...

Heron Here where the tide leaving seems to stand flat and steel silver across the bay, the bird with the long neck waits hours for a single peck. Amazed at his own virtue he's...

New Novels The House of Gair. By Eric Linklater. (Cape. 1Os. 6d.) A Time to Laugh. By Laurence Thompson. (Andre DCutsch. Ss. 6d.) The Weir. By Jane Gillespie. (Peter...

White Man's Burden A very distinguished American lady, a noted traveller in and commentator upon the world, recently visited a Crown Colony where a friend of mine called (let...

The Tortuous Mind From A Spectator's Notebook, June 26, 1953: "I shall be surprised if there is not trouble over a novel called A Woman's Evil Inspiration.... It describes, in...

A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK FEW years ago, finding myself at the American airA base on the island of Antigua, I watched the arrival I Lthere of the new Governor of the Leeward...

- Celtic Limelight From an advertisement inserted in the Newv Yorker by the National Tourist Publicity Organisation for Ireland: "'Come over to Ireland this fall, when...

From Lhasa to Portland Place I was at a small dinner-party given this week for Herr Heinrich Harrer, whose book., Seven Years in Tibet, is having a deserved success. He arrived...

It's Slower By Dreadnought Sir Alfred Savage, who now faces some trouble and danger in British Guiana, is not, like his opposite numbers in Jamaica, British Honduras and the...

What's Become of Waring.? The Diary of Alfred Domett, 1872-1885. Edited by E. A. Horsman. (Oxford University Press. 25s.) WHAT'S become of Waring since he gave us all the slip...

On The Roof Seven Years in Tibet. By Heinrich plarrer. (Hart-Davis. I 6s.) Book Society's Choice. ON the strength of a brief reference in Mr. Peter Fleming's introduction, it...

Fungi This is the time for fungus growth and walking through the woods on damp autumn days one often discovers a clump of fungus on a decaying tree, as I discovered a great...

COAL: A MINER'S REPLY - - SIR,-I am writing this letter in reply to Mr. Anderson's "'The Price of Memorics." The very basis of my article, " Coal-A Miner's View " was that the...

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION SiR,-There has been so much adverse criticism of the British Association's Liverpool mccting in your columns recently, criticism with muLch of which I...

Ce(ters to the Editor THE UNHAPPY HYPOCRITE SIR,- fn his robust rejection of Professor Johnson's estimate of Dickens, Mr. Waugh is surely too hard on the great novelist. There...

Frost Precautions Frost and cold winds stunt and wilt plants more than most people realise and while even geraniums can be left out of doors in comparatively mild districts, it...

The Nairobi Round-Up The Kikuyu tribal reserve is full to overflowing. A week ago the Government of Kenya decided that no m1o re could be absorbed and that repatriation had to...

France: Time for Decision A Paris Correspondent writes: France's political season begins in an atmospherc of tension. First of all, there is the lingering tension of the recent...

Two Scorpions in a Bottle To think correctly, as Aldous Huxley observed, is the condition of behaving well. "Those who would think correctly," he added, "must resist...

Strategicus H. C. O'Neill. who died last week after an illness of two years, was a journialist of long and exceptionally varied experience. In the world of ncwspapcrs anrd...

The Ryder Cup By FRANK LITTLER 'HE latest of our defeats in the Ryder Cup matcheswe won the last in 1933-has been too narrow to support any idea that the series is not worth...

"A Correspondent Writes" AL B y A N T HONY THW A I TE (Christ Church, Oxford) SINCE I came back to Oxford a week ago, I have wakened in the early hours of each morning with a...

TURNING EAST A MID the cacophony of the various Russian replies to the Western Powers' invitation to a conference on ill Germany one single note is struck again and againChina....

Single-handers The Cruise of the Kate. By E. E. Middleton. (Hart-Davis. 9s. 6d.) The Voyage of Anahita. By Captain Louis Bernicot. (Hart-Davis. lOs. 6d.) EHE narratives of...

Reviews Encounter No. I, October, 1953. Edited BY Steynhen Snender and Irving Kristol. (Secker & Warburg. 2s. 6d.) Chance. Autumn, 1953. Edited by Robin Scott-Smith. (Jack...

Time and Idea. By A. Robert Caponigri. (Routledge. 18s.) MR. ROBERT CAPONIGRI, Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic American University of Notre Dame, has written this...

Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 19171941. Volume 111. Edited by J. Degr-as. (O.U.P. foi R.l.1.A. 42s.) TimE prCcsent Volume which covers the period 1933-41 ends the first...

Seventh Continent. By Arthur Scholes. (Allen & Unwin. 21s.) Till contribution of Australia and New Zealand to the field of Antarctic exploration is considerable. In the famous...

The Costumes of Chlios. By Philip P. Argenti. (Batsf'ord. 10 guineas.) Cmios has perhaps the best claim to count itself' the birthplace of Homer. Travellers have hailed it in...

The Letters of Franz Liszt to Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstcin. Translated and cdi ted by Howard E. Hugo. (O.U.P. 42s.) THIS is the first publication of Liszt's letters to the...

OTHER RECENT BOOKS Plato's Theory of Art. By R. C. Lodge. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 25s.) MR. LODGE appears to have tried hard to prevent this work from being one of academic...

Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851. By Rupert Gunnis. (Odharns. £3 3s. Od.) IT is curious that there are literally dozens of books, good, bad, and indifferent, on the...

DESTINATION GEORGETOWN W Y rHAT precise contingency has led the Governor of British Guiana to call for British warships is not known. But Sir Alfred Savage is not the man to...

Indian Village How does the President of South Korea come to be a major threat to peace '? Partly because of a decision, taken eighteen months ago by the United Nations...

EACH FOR EACH SIR,--While touring in Scotland recently I noticed a number of boulders on which was written "England for the English." Perhaps one of your readers could explain...

SIR,-- l. G. S. FrasCr, il 11is cordial and d generous letter, still under-rates, I think, the extent to which the hymn can be a vehicle for poetry. Cowpcr and Blake and...

LINCOLN'S DOGGEREL SIR,-Thc quotation from Abraham Lincoln's boyhood notebook, with which Sir Ernest Barker closes his review of Mlr. Thomas's biography, interests me greatly....

MUSICAL AMATEURS SIR,-I must join issue with C. W. Orr for his attack on musical amateurs since he grossly maligns a whole host of enthusiastic listeners. As one who has...

POETIC CRITICISM SIR,-I have not read Mr. Fraser's book but I am surprised that Kipling should be represented as inditfrernt to Horace. He wrdte a short story devoted to the...

Thou Shalt Not Dance . By BRUCE WILLIAMSON Dublin. IN a brief spasm of disobliging perception, Mr. Evelyn Waugh has called the Irish "an adroit and joyless people." His...

Air Speed Records I By OLIVER STEWART I T W ORLD air speed records have entered a critical region, unlike anything known before, and that is why they present a technical...

A New Section in the Spectator As part of the changes in type and format introduced in last week's Spectator, two faniliar features of the paper and one new one are now*...

Is there a Japanese Menace ?-I By HUGH RICE A FEW days ago a British research engineer was handed a report, prepared by a group of Japanese working in J ~his own field, in...

CONTEMPORARY ARTS ART John Martin. (Whitecliapcl Art, Gallery.) ---Thomas Bewick. (Bethnal Green Museum.) L. S. Lowry. (Lef~vre Gallery.) IT is a curious quirk that has...

Master of the King's Musick SIR ARNOLID BAX'S death in Ireland has a poetic rightness which he himself would have appreciated. Wholly English by birth, he was a passionate...

OPERA Luisa Miller. By Verdi. (Sadler's Wells.) Pooit Schiller! Little read in this country in the original and probably less enjoyed, he must be known to a considerable...

The Changing Face of Oxford B y J. C. M A S T E R M A N (Provost of Worcester College) ItO XFORD is not what it used to be; everything has I deteriorated-the life, the men,...

BOOKS OF THE WEEK 4. The Victorian Conscience By REX WARNER T HE chief thing to notice about the Victorian conscience is that it was alive and working. Sometimes it worked in...

A Question of Politics The Vocabulary of Politics. By T. D. Weldon. (Penguin Books. 2s.) tiIs is a light-hearted book, and is all the better for being so: philoSophy is...