While wishing Mr Callaghan good fortune in his premiership (as we do), it may be said without prejudice that in the context of Mr Healey's Budget proposals the prosPects are...

Britain lost a Foreign Secretary and gained an uncle: James Callaghan became the seventeenth British Prime Minister of the century and, whatever lies ahead, already memorable...

Boring, and bad for Britain Patrick Cosg rave Until this week I have never seen—and nobody can recall—a Budget speech delivered to an emptying chamber and to a steadily...

Not quite a Tory budget Nicholas Davenport The number of Members of Parliament rePorted to be asleep during the budget speech did not surprise me. It was the most prolix b...

No one watched the Labour leadership struggle with closer attention than Mrs Thatcher. No one is pondering the outcome with greater interest—or rather self-interest. Will Mr...

Invalid Power rules Auberon Waugh A few days after the end of the 1967 war in the Middle East I remember waking up in the Tel Aviv Hilton without the faintest idea where I...

Sam White Paris In the beginning de Gaulle created Le Monde. Although to this day Le Monde carries on its masthead that it was founded by Hubert Beuve-Mery, Beuve-Mery has...

Andrew Faulds Saudi Arabia has woken from its long mediaeval sleep. Its princes intend to lug it into next century's push-button technology. Twenty years ago their subjects...

Martin Walker Madrid In spite of Opposition demonstrations, prison breaks by Basque guerrillas, the arrest of 300 people and the clubbing and tear-gassing of many more, the...

Christopher Booker Consider an Act of Parliament which would simultaneously do two things. The first is to remove from hundreds of thousands of the humblest people in our...

Jim Higgins Last week British Leyland settled with their former second-in-command, Mr John Barber. By a payment of 'substantial compensation' they ended the long dispute over...

Quentin Crewe Somebody has got to be cheerful. So this is a story of conservation, of charity and, above all, of cooperation. Nantwich, in Cheshire, is a town brimming with...

Neil Sinclair The recent drama of Jeremy Thorpe was accompanied by a plaintive and familiar cry from Mr Harold Wilson and others: who is to protect us from the scurrilous...

Ian Bradley It is ironic that the voices crying loudest for the imposition of import controls at the Present time should come from the left, for historically in British...

Oliver Stewart Metrication is not going to be shifted. Although weights and measures legislation and the objections of some industries and professions may interfere with the...

Elisabeth Dunn Five years and a week ago, Lord Crowther's committee published its report on consumer credit and its thoughts on how the credit business should be run. Five...

Sir: Having recently returned from Athens where, as a special consultant to the government, he helped Greek radio and television as an asphyxiating state enterprise at the...

asserting that so far alltalk of electoral reform has been for the benefit of the political parties and their desire for power rather than for the benefit of the elector and...

Sir: I must correct what may have been a misleading impression given by your reviewer, Peter Ackroyd, in 'Blood, thunder and Gore' (Spectator, 27 March, p. 20). Washington,...

Sir: Although somewhat late, I beg to refer you to the comment published in the Spectator dated 21 February 1976 under, the heading 'Rhodesian opportunity'. In the first...

Sir: Neither the Rhodesians nor anyone else fought for Britain. They fought for themselves because they didn't want to become Nazi slaves. They knew that if Britain fell, they...

Sir: Mr R. W. F. Holmes, in his letter (27 March) was critical of your excellent article 'Onwards the nanny state' (6 March). He has, surely, overlooked two important...

Sir: I find it most remarkable that Lady Gaitskell should quote from an unnamed, undated and uncharacterised document Mere is a document', she says) about me (20 March). First I...

The birth of the Jews? Philip Mason The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage Arthur Koestler (Hutchinson £4.75) The Khazars between the sixth and tenth...

Maurice Buckmaster A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War 1939-1945 William Stevenson (Macmillan £4.95) Public demand for a definitive history of 'what went on behind the scenes...

Duncan Fallowell Figures in Bright Air David Plante (Gollancz £3.75) None Shall Know Peter de Pol nay (W. H. Allen £3.50) David Plante's new novel, Figures in Bright Air,...

Benny Green Drawn from Memory Ernest H. Shepard (Penguin 50p) The death of Ernest Shepard reminds me of a tiny but deeply revealing incident concerning his reputation. One...

Brigid Brophy Summer Overtures Clive Murphy (Dobson £3.50) 'The judge exonerated Marcus.' It must be the most condensed account of an arrest and trial for murder in the corpus...

Harry Fieldhouse Mondays, Thursdays Keith Waterhouse (Michael Joseph £4.50) It is more than six years now since Keith Waterhouse took over Cassandra's old space in the Daily...

David Boulton My Search for Patty Hearst Steven Weed and Scott Swanton (Seeker and Warburg £4.90) Steven Weed was Patty Hearst's school teacher and lover. They got engaged at...

Richard Shone Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven Raymund FitzSimons (Hamish Hamilton £5.25) He was obviously intolerable—`a copperlaced, twopenny tearmouth, rendered mad by conceit...

Harriet Waugh The Verdict Hildegard Knef (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.50) Illness is one of the hardest subjects for writers to tackle successfully—especially their own...

The stuff of dreams Gillian Freeman Fortunately for the publishers of children's books their readers have widely divergent tastes—a point made pictorially and predictably in...

Francis King Until the eighteenth century, children tende d to be regarded as adults in miniature. Then gradually they were segregated, as almost another species, with the...

Music and Dance Helen Smith It is one of the sad facts about the current system of listing buildings that the vast majority of those buildings of historic or architectural...

Beyond words Robin Young The London Contemporary Dance Theatre have been industriously sallying forth into the country in evangelical teams explaining to people what...

Soap opera Rodney Milnes The Duenna and Maria Golovin (Camden Festival) King Roger (Coliseum) The Camden Festival's opera programmes have always been intriguing. Their...

Stripped down John McEwen Allen Jones took quite a caning when his sculptures of stylised playgirls coincided with the opening campaign of Women's Lib. That he is still...

All lit up Kenneth Hurren Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (Stratford-upon-Avon) Having taken some exception to a recent Stratford version of Romeo and Juliet set...

Good Greer Jeffrey Bernard In last week's edition of The Book Programme (BBC 2) Germaine Greer gave a faultless display of earning the television appearance money in the...