M r John Major, the Prime Minister, continued talks with Mr Albert Reynolds, the Irish Prime Minister, though at a lower level than a 'summit'. The UFF shot dead two Catholic...

1706; Telex 27124; FaX 071-242 0603 ON THE BOX t's the end of an era, and it will mean the destruction of a vital part of our nation- al heritage: To hear some of the comments...

At last, the British and Irish people find something they can all agree on SIMON HEFFER Dublin t erter the non-summit here last Friday, the Irish, who feel Mr Major's contacts...

JOHN OSBORNE nia's goddess Zuni scored again last Satur- day when the BBC's 'Performance' series, devoted to 'classic' plays, transmitted its offering of The Entertainer. As...

For each princess kills the thing she loves CHARLES MOORE H aving attacked press intrusion into royal privacy, I feel in quite a strong posi- tion to defend the press from the...

Anne Applebaum on how the Arab-Israeli peace accord has deepened the divides within Israel Jerusalem `DO YOU know where we are?' Ilit asked me. I did not; through the window I...

Fergal Keane patrols a South African township with the men who pick up the pieces Kathlehong FROM a distance it looked as if the dog was asleep, head perched between its...

Boris Johnson road-tests some of Europe's leading bodyguards Brussels IN LASNE, the richest suburb of Brussels, is one of the few serious Euro- pean bodyguard schools outside...

Alastair Campbell meets Virginia Bottomley, nanny to the nation and leaderene-in-waiting AFTER NEGOTIATING a number of hurdles and hiccups, an audience with Marks & Spencer's...

persist. . . IT IS ONE of the peculiar paradoxes of our existence that while everything gets better, we experience it as having wors- ened. Never have people been so healthy,...

How to save yourself 51 trips to the library . .. or over £35 on The Spectator If you're forced to share The Spectator with fellow students, then you'll know how difficult it...

Damian Thompson on how Anglo-Catholics are fast disappearing to Rome THE PARISH CHURCH of St John the Baptist, Holland Road, a fine example of the Victorian Gothic revival...

SO, AS THE train accelerated out of Doncaster I heard the chief steward say, `Customers who wish to avail them- selves of the buffet facility should remember to be in possession...

Professor Tyndall died on Monday at his house at Haslemere, in the seventy- fourth year of his age, his death being caused by a very sad accident in his wife's mistake of a...

MICHAEL HOWARD has struck a raw nerve with his call for Neighbourhood Watch groups to go out and patrol the streets. Pious civic leaders, Labour politi- cians and social...

David Watkin argues that modem buildings do not have to be terrible THE PRINCE and Princess of Wales were quite busy, separately, in Cambridge during November. On the 11th,...

Jingle bells, statutory blacks, an enigmatic tattoo and a touch of heliotrope PAUL JOHNSON S ome things about Christmas have not changed, I thought, as I climbed the stairs...

Another great British idea so much envied that nobody bothers to copy it CHRISTOPHER FILDES T he world must be an envious place if British television is the envy of the world....

LEFT TO themselves, our broadcasters and their regulators would have spent 60 years getting as far as a choice of four tele- vision channels. (In New York, you get a choice of...

MICKEY CANTOR and Sir Leon Brittan, face to face in the Gatt negotiations, have given a new term to the negotiator's art: a Lithuanian stand off. If at long last they have...

THE PRINCESS of Wales's withdrawal from the limelight got off to a good start this week, when she named a Virgin aero- plane for Richard Branson. He arranged for her to have her...

CLEARING ITS throat on a raw Decem- ber day, the Securities and Investments Board prepared to tell us what it would do for the latest victims of financial advice milked on their...

Sir: When the English make pronounce- ments on continental nobility or aristocracy they, with the notable exception of Mr Alastair Forbes, almost invariably spout drivel....

Sir: I was surprised to read the letter by Nicholas Mostyn (Letters, 20 November). The Family Law Bar Association shares the view of the Solicitors Family Law Associa- tion...

Sir: Congratulations to Theodore Dalrym- ple on his piece Oust count the suits', 27 November). It will sound a sadly familiar note for many hospital doctors of the older...

Sir: Alasdair Palmer CA clean break with fairness', 13 November) is not quite right when he suggests that expressed 'implaca- ble hostility' of a mother will amount to a cogent...

UK ❑ £77.00 ❑ £39.00 Europe (airmail) ❑ £88.00 ❑ £44.00 USA Airspeed ❑ US$125.00 ❑ US$63.00 USA Airmail ❑ US$175.00 ❑ US$88.00 Rest of Airmail ❑ £111.00 ❑ £55.50 World Airspeed...

Sir: Is Nigel Nicolson just testing your read- ers' memory? He claims to have killed an animal deliberately on only one occasion (Long life, 20 November). I recollect his vivid...

Sir: Your Belgian correspondent (Letters, 13 November) is incorrect. The site of Napoleon's defeat on 18 June 1815 was Mont St Jean, not Braine l'Alleud. Braine l'Alleud was an...

Sir: Undoubtedly the people of Notting- hamshire do have their own way of pro- nouncing certain place names in their coun- ty (Prom cobblestones to juggernauts', 4 December)....

Sir: Barry Legg's belief (Letters, 23 Octo- ber) that the so-called targeting of welfare benefits will reduce a burgeoning beneficia- ry class is wrong. Targeting of welfare...

Sir: Simon Heffer (Politics, 6 November) decries 'modern' education on the grounds that it would not have taught him how to divide £400 million by 22,000. He then pro- ceeds to...

under the Roman '1 married an air hostess. I can tell you the charm and graciously efficient service very soon went to pot.' yoke protected by forts on the Trent? Hadrian's...

Sir: In a rather pathetic letter (27 Novem- ber) David Kemp, the Canterbury Dioce- san Secretary, asks for understanding and encouragement towards church bureaucrats. I trust...

Sir: The correct name for the human fun- dament is anus. It is Mr Morris who is the ass (Letters, 27 November). K F. E. Daniel Ball Hall, Broughton in Furness, Cumbria

An old-fashioned progressive John Grigg LIBERAL CRUSADER: THE LIFE OF SIR ARCHIBALD SINCLAIR by Gerard De Groot C. Hurst, £17.50, pp. 266 uestions such as 'Who became leader...

Nigel Spivey THE MAGUS OF THE NORTH by Isaiah Berlin Cape, £14.99, pp. 144 I saiah Berlin has surrendered another book to the world. The octogenarian magus of Oxford had...

The review of Pamela Cooper's autobiography, A Cloud of Forgetting, in last week's issue was by Sarah Bradford, not Bradbury, as printed. We apologise for this error.

Hilary Corke OUT OF DANGER by James Fenton Penguin, f7.50, pp. 104 I do not know if James Fenton is a tough guy, but I suppose he must be, since he does the things that tough...

Philip Mansel MARIE ANTOINE 11 ' E, by Ian Dunlop Sinclair-Stevenson, f20, pp. 410 T he ceremonial hall in the Hofburg in Innsbruck contains one of the finest sets of dynastic...

James Walton M ark Frost, American film director and co-creator of Twin Peaks, cannot be accused of playing it safe with his first novel. Set in 1884, it begins with Arthur...

Mark Archer THE CIVILISATION OF EUROPE IN THE RENAISSANCE by John Hale HarperCollins, £25, pp. 648 A ny book whose title challenges com- parison with Burckhardt's The...

William Leith THE SPECTATOR ANNUAL edited by Dominic Lawson HarperCollins, £20, pp. 309 I t was the year when Brian Clough resigned; when Ian Hislop was asked to appear nude on...

Roger Clarke THE GRISLY WIFE by Rodney Hall Faber, £14.99, pp. 261 P rovincial Australia; late 19th-century. A police sergeant calls at the house of Catherine Byrne during the...

A bonny night. I step outside and gaze, head back in autumn dark, up into space, where stars between the clouds burn with quiet praise, and think for whatever reason of your...

Good God, poor Septimus, stop all this praise. You make me seem a vase in some museum. Goodbye the living poet, hello the mausoleum! I haven't written an unselfconscious phrase...

Bruce Bernard BRUCE CHATWIN: PHOTOGRAPHS AND NOTEBOOKS edited by David King and Francis Wyndham, Cape, £20, pp. 160 B ruce Chatwin had a 'legendary eye', something that the...

Juliet Townsend T he struggle, late on Christmas Eve, to enclose a stuffed giraffe or a pair of stilts in a neat parcel, brings home the convenience of giving children books as...

William Dalrymple THE CROSSING PLACE by Philip Marsden HarperCollins, £16.99, pp. 248 I n the late summer of 1848 the Hon. Robert Curzon sat in the library of his fam- ily's...

CHRISTMAS GIFT SUBSCRIPTION Give a gift subscription of The Spectator to a friend and we will give you a full size bottle of ten year old Glenmorangie Single Highland Malt. But...

DIARY 1994 T he Spectator 1994 Diary, bound in soft burgundy leather, will shortly be available. With a new layout and a whole week to view, Monday to Sunday, the diary is 5" x...

Exhibitions Diana Armfield (Browse & Darby, till 23 December) Tony Bream (Henry Wyndham Fine Art, till 17 Decem- Gwyneth Johnstone (Michael Parkin, till 10 December) Temporary...

Death by a thousand yawns Peter Phillips thinks the Arts Council is wrong to continue funding four London orchestras T he debate about the number of orchestras currently...

The Wind in the Willows (Olivier) Celestina (Lyric Hammersmith Studio) Into the woods Sheridan Morley I t is a curious, but infinitely English, real- isation that the...

Self- Sophie Constants or both of Britain's large-scale contem- porary dance troupes, 1993 has been a year of internal crisis, self-engineered upheaval and wilful destruction....

Nice work if you can get it Martin Gayford Secondly, Dan Barrett is to be welcomed especially because he is a trombonist of the very rarest and most cherishable kind the...

Happy families Mark Steyn T he Golden Age of pop culture has been ill-served by motion pictures: Greystoke (that's to say, Tarzan) and Bat- man Returns persisted in trying to...

All spruced up Ursula Buchan I have expatiated at length in the recent past about how carefully one must consider before cutting down trees in gardens, and that the...

In praise of older women Taki A New York s a loyal future husband of the Princess of Wales, I ordered my minions back in the Big Olive to go with another cover for the...

Absolute bottom Martyn Harris I t is hard to see the Carlton takeover of Central TV as anything but deeply depress- ing in a week when Carlton's most presti- gious programme...

Bed of nettles Jeffrey Bernard T en days ago I was flattened by one of the infections that are doing the rounds. It was and is a particularly virulent one and it called for a...

My kind of music Nigel Nicolson W hen you come to think of it, the suc- cess of Desert Island Discs is extraordinary. Roy Plomley's formula was very odd indeed. One has to...

merin g ue in the works canteen the other day, and the merin g ue won. A tooth to the bad, I headed for that antiseptic corner of Marylebone which one always thinks of as...

about any well- known contemporary figures. You launched nearly 400 of them at my funny bone, and 18 were dead on target. (I pause only to mention how odd it was that four of...

Raymond Keene SPAIN'S FINEST CAVA SOMETIMES CHESS MIRRORS ART. I have recently been struck by a marked similarity between reactions to the world chess championship and to the...

We now know that Hitler had a special secretarial staff whose job it was to answer the questions put to him in his personal mail — a worried youth leader wants to know how to...

1139: Apres-ski A first prize of £25 and a bottle of Graham's Malvedos Vintage Port for the first correct solution opened on 3 January, with two runners-up prizes of £15 (or,...

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Booked for Christmas Frank Keating STOCKING-FILLER of the year is again a completely updated Umbro Book of Foot- ball Quotations (Stanley Paul), in which the hapless Graham...

Q. My mother, my sister and 1 spend Christmas Day together (and the rest of the year separately). We have a long-estab- lished tradition of opening our presents on Christmas...