for secrecy In the midst of increasingly wild and mysterious surmise about standards of public life which currently prevails at Westminster and in the press, one thing must be...

P rom Mrs C. Ackroyd S ir: I am sorry about Mr Gibbs's bladder complaint (week before last), and Mrs Pryce's reproductive woes Oast week). But by whatever reasoning do you give...

p1-0 Miss Enid Lakeman. ,2 afraid I must add yet another v '"Y record of letters, partly to agree tl e I ll ' at s trongly with Humphry Berkeley need a strong parliament, and...

From the Hon. T. C. F. Prittie, MBE, MA. Sir: On re-reading your very moving editorial of April 20 'Israel — to survive and prosper,' I note that you asked the western world to...

of April 20 accused Israel of overthrowing the principles of International Law by continuing to occupy Arab land. In stating this Mr Adams appears to have forgotten the origin...

Sir: In his article about direct grant schools Logie Bruce Lockhart writes "perhaps the Liberals at least would not find it impossible to live up to their name and to show that...

Sir: May I correct an error in Bookbuyer's Bookend (April 6)? In February the board of the magazine, Scottish International, decided to cease publication, because of its...

Sir: May I correct Dr Linklater's mistaken assertion (May 3) that he and I inhabit a "strange" world where individual freedom is being "ruthlessly nibbled away"? He might think...

Sir: In his perceptive review of Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature (May 4), Professor Flew makes an understandable error when he says of the last chapter 'This is...

Sir: We are writing a book about visual puns and verbal puns. May we ask your readers to communicate their favourite examples to us at the address below? Paul Hammond and...

Patrick Cosgrave There is a neurotic and shivering smell of collapse about politics in Westminster these days: almost no major politician appears capable of sensible behaviour...

a i G l eneral de Gaulle to extricate herself from h er African colonies. It seems likely that she as found one in General de Spinola. Of c ourse, the General has not started...

John Peyton We still preserve the belief that we in this country are at least as good as other people; we are therefore affected by a profound and debilitating disappointment...

Spectator May 11, 191 In how many large companies are the r ela i tionships between management al l employees regarded as being of absolut e prime importance before trouble...

Ilichard Cecil i irheiere are two courses and only two, in regard to one would be to govern Ireland. Where our ; al lticians fall into the mess in which they are n„‘!lays...

Too many eggs in one basket John Szemery So the Government has decided to go ahead with the Channel Tunnel. Yet in ten to fifteen years' time we could well be isolated and...

Clement Cave Some 900,000 American households last year stopped watching television news programmes on the three networks, reports a recent survey. To rub in the underlying...

w it , is Mr Heath's tragedy that his only dream the Common Market, and that the British Den i , - 1 3, e would not share that dream. Expensive M Paigns with specious statistics...

Friends, acquaintances, nay even discerning critics, of Tom Puzzle need hardly be told that his standards in social matters are sufficiently elevated that he disapproves, aye he...

Logie Bruce Lockhart "What do you do to get your boys to meet ordinary people?" "Don't they feel that they are an elite?" "Why don't you teach them Sociology?" And so on....

Press cutting Bill Grundy I am a broken man. I have just learned the staggering tact that ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand in the hope that whatever is troubling...

Spiro Agnew has just published a 5,000-word extract from his novel in progress called A Very Special Relationship. As the world now knows, the book tells the story of an...

Perfecting the practice Philip Kleinman "Do you think any of the advertisements in this publication are misleading? If so, fill in the coupon below and send it to the...

Deceptive idols Martin Sullivan In a famous passage Francis Bacon reminds us that there are four kinds of idols which decieve the human mind. They are idols of the Tribe, of...

Denis Wood It is good counsel to contain oneself in patience, and live with a new garden for a whole year before making drastic alterations, both to assess the value of the...

Justified caution Bernard Dixon Last November in these columns I described with almost tiresome reserve some new research that seemed to suggest a way of preventing the body's...

"Frankly," wrote Malcolm Lowry, just out of a Haitian hospital where he had spent a week after having drunk himself unconscious, "I have no gift for writing. I started by being...

Simon Raven G. K. Chesterton A Centenary Appraisal Edited by John Sullivan (Elek £5.00) For there is good news yet to hear and fine things Before we go to Paradise by way of...

Jan Morris Clive of India Mark Bence-Jones (Constable £3.95) Robert Clive is distinctly dead, deader than most of our national heroes, and nearly as dead as all the lesser...

George Gale Elizabeth I, a study in power and intellect; Paul Johnson (Weicienfeld and Nicolson £5.95) I have long had the opinion that, by and large, quite enough historical...

Real lives Peter Ackroyd Married Lives Harry Kressing (Faber £2.95) The Living Daylights Jill Neville (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £2.50) A novel which almost opens on the line...

Enter Psmith Benny Green Two years ago I was taken to task by friends and readers for suggesting in these columns that there may have been moments in his life when P. G....

Bookend Bookbuyer is fully conscious of the importance ot showing proper reverence to the departed , but the organisers of the annual Nice Book Fair seem to be going a little...

SPmeti me during the first of the ti"iree acts of John Hopkins's play, ex t of Kin (which the National h e atre has put on at the Old Vic), tile a dozen members of some ghastly...

It's usually a toss-up whether the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is going to be hailed as "what fun" or slammed as "how vulgar." Let us compromise with a "how vulgar,...

Reviews by art critics of exhibitions in which other art critics have had some sort of hand are invariably laudatory or, at worst, when praise is ludicrously out of the...

Southern discomfort Duncan FaHowell Presumably the film A Streetcar Named Desire (Cinecenta, 'X') has been re-released to synchronise with the revival of the play in the West...

Rodney Mihies With foreign tour operators Prophesying death and disaster, this year's British Festival Promoters may well find themselves living off the fdte of the land. As if...

Nicholas Davenport The popular view of our unending economic crisis was well expressed by Sir John Davis at the advertising conference last week. This country, he said, is...

Unfreezing vital funds John Foster It is estimated that there are between £3,000 million and £4,000 million of bank and institutional monies temporarily loaned on development...

A most extraordinary current investment has come my way in the following manner. Gazing vacantly around the various advertisements in the large lift in Goodge Street tube...