should be he rather than either of his two predecessors who has succeeded in introducing a Budget that looks both successful and Conservative will have been something of .a...

SPECTATOR ESTABLISHED 1828 - NUMBER 6720 - FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1957 - PRICE NINEPENCE

By ERSKINE CHILDERS Cairo F OR seven months, Egypt has been denied her sterling and US assets; for five months, the Canal was empty; and it is widely assumed that she is in a...

I HE great merit of the Defence White Paper is not that it makes any startling changes—talk of a 'revolution in defence' is very wide of the mark—but that its author has caught...

EnwAans scored from . . 30 yards.—Daily Express, April 8. 25 yards. — Daily Mail, April 8. 22 yards.—News Chronicle, April 8. 20 yards.—Peopk, April 7. 18-yard line.—News...

THE chief foreign news items this week seem to focus around the British White Paper on Defence. In this document Mr. Duncan Sandys announced government inten- . tions on defence...

By RICHARD H. ROVERE New York In Ottawa, in Cairo and in Washington, the word among those who knew Mr. Norman is that the publicity given by the Senate sub-committee to this...

If they are wise they will speedily forget the scene which preceded it. The present House of Commons has frequently been compared to a school debating society of a particularly...

Ovea 15,000 Catholic men marched through London. —News Chronicle, April 8. I6,000.—Daily Express, April 8. 25,000.—BBC, April 7. Mote than 30,000.—Daily Herald, April 8....

OLYMPIC GAMES athletic track, laid at the Melbourne cricket ground at a cost of £3,000, has been sold , for £240.—Evening News, April 5, p. 12. THE OLYMPIC athletic track at...

the occasion when one of them asked, 'Who is Connie Gilchrist?' (Who was she, by the way?) But I shall be surprised if 1957 produces a riper pair of left-handed compliments than...

Witnessed : a group of tammied and kilted Scots, off the night train, debouching into the station yard, singing 'Don't Knock the Rock.' * * *

THE COMPARISON made by some good judges between Mr. Gaitskell's tactics during the Labour Party split over hydrogen-bomb tests last week and those employed by Lord Attlee on...

THE PRESENT Government has been widely ac- claimed—and denounced—as European-minded : containing as it does so many Ministers who have been closely linked with the development...

are intrinsically bad but that they do not collect an audience large enough to justify their cost. The Third Programme's amputation-warrant has been sealed in the last few years...

for the accused, however monstrous the alleged crime and however little he may deserve it, simply because the forces arrayed against him seem so much stronger than he is. In the...

powers appeared in The Times last week: over the signature of L. A. Abraham. Though the address, -House of Commons, was given, it was not stated that Mr. Abraham happens to be...

to exhume her body and carry out a post- . mortem; and both she and her husband died only last year. Memories about these deaths therefore must still be relatively fresh, and...

Owing to the Easter Holiday the Specta- tor will be on sale a day earlier than usual.

that the public could be educated, in time, by the injection of little nuggets of culture into the basic entertainment• slag—the idea being that by the time the listener, or...

By BRIAN INGLIS A FEW years ago a couple of articles on 'Physical Treatments of the Mind and Spiritual Healing' appeared in the Spectator, the author discussing the possible...

By D. W. BROGAN I T is perhaps to the influence of our modern /Esop, Professor Isaiah Berlin, that we owe the popularity of such titles as that which Profes- sor Burns has...

By ALAN WYKES G ALSWORTHY'S plays are being exported, at three shillings net each, in green paper covers, to Ashanti and Nairobi and Borneo and other places where coloured...

By JOHN BETJEMAN CASUALTY LIST BERKSHIRE: Denford, Holy Trinity Church. Gothick, designed 1830-34 by J. B. PapWoith, in a park, and made as a deliberate fanciful contrast with...

By STRIX A. Extract from a Despatch, dated April 11, 1957, to the Foreign Office from HM Ambassador in Strelsau. . . . Accordingly, without waiting .. for in- structions, I...

By LESLIE ADRIAN HERE were no cheers or fanfares when, a I small, but important, piece of gastronomic history was made the other day. A new English cheese was marketed. As...

is true that at Gloucester, Nottingham, York, Oldham and maybe one or two other places, social psychiatric services have developed as 'isolated ex- periments' in just that...

Plowman boring, and Troilus and Criseyde a 'footling rigmarole,', must be unhappily limited. Mr. Amis's article on 'Anglo-Saxon Platitudes' suggests two quotations: '1....

of your issue of April 5, 'how many of yoUr readers are as sick of Strix' as he is. I, in my turn, wonder how many of your readers, on reading Mr. Waterhouse's venomous and...

SIR,—! have written Mr•. Kingsley Amis's comments on long poems in English out on a slip of paper (for ready reference) thus : - The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost: remote and...

publish Mr. Amis's review of a new translation of Beowulf alarms one with the renewed realisation of the power of a reputation—even a bad reputation. After Mr. -Amis has...

of his faculties' could class Chaucer with Gower, or Sir Gawain with Havelock, and I should be interested to meet an English don who so con- fused his 'certificates of merit.'...

in your issue of April 5. With disappointment that apparently not everybody gets the same feeling of satisfaction and agreement with the atithor on reading Strix's essays as I....

APRIL 14, 1832 IT is said that the Russian Government is exil- ing the Poles in thousands to Siberia, where they are destined to form new settlements. The heads of these...

paedic and reverential knowledge of early British Socialism. It may be that I worded my remarks about Keir Hardie's opinions rather too sweepingly. Surely, however, the view...

'And the Other Writer' Grahame Greene Anglo-Saxon Platitudes Peter Ure, M. R. Ridley, Burns Singer, Mary Holtby Keir Hardie Robert Blake Strix Group-Capt. Guy Tyrrell, David...

S1R, — When I agreed to give an interview to the Spectator, it did not occur to me that your repre- sentative would be employing the techniques of the lurid scandal-sheets more...

indeed any, need to remind Mr. Beaton that we are not living in an ideal world and are not likely to achieve perfection, individually or corporately, on this planet. With...

Smith's bookstalls to handle Randolph Churchill's book, would it interest you to know that this sort of thing is not a new practice? In 1932 my first book, a novel, met a...

of smearless controversy were it not that in a letter of some 500 words he uses the following phrases amongst others about Dr. Donald Johnson : 'his distorted...

your issue of March 29 occur these words: 'Again, the British farmer may prove to be a stumbling block, though there can be no question of sacrificing the real political and...

the ranks of the dog-don't-eat-dog brigade. I had the impression that the article on John Osborne was written by some seedy little man in a raincoat whose main preoccupation is...

GIO PONT! the architect, designer, painter and editor who, with some associates, is the subject of a small exhibition at Liberty's, has been too glibly labelled a Universal Man,...

Film Fever 9 WHAT is a fan? The films this .A..R week being nothing much, in- stead of writing about them I have been meditating on this individually despised and col- ,...

THE BBC with the help of Radiodiffusion Television Francaise went all out on the State visit to France, which provided the best pageantry since the Coronation. Will it make the...

Camino Real. By Tennessee Williams. (Phoenix.)—Damn Yankees. (Coliseum.) You have landed up this time in a sleazy central American piazza peopled by whores, pimps, perverts and...

The Doctor By CHRISTOPHER•HOLL1S D R. DALTON is a most extraordinary man. He opens his book* with a paragraph of specula- tion how, if it had not been for his narrow defeat at...

Write, for example The night is starred And the lights sparkle, blue, in the distance. The wind of the night whirls in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the most sad...

35s.) THE prehistoric art of South Africa—the art of the so-called Bushmen—has long been known to archaeologists and artists who have for years studied it in copies of the...

The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolu- tion. By John Bayley. (Constable, 18s.) . MR. BAYLEY has written two books in one. The first is a study of the destiny of the...

Love, Freedom and Society. By J. Middleton Murry. (Jonathan Cape, 18s.) Two days after this book was published, John Middleton Murry died, so that it represents, in effect,....

The Eleven Men of Eppynt. By Roland Mathias. (Dock Leaves Press, 10s. 6d.) THE first twenty-six years of Isaac Babel's life, which provided , him with the material for nearly...

BOND, the unspeakable Bond, is back. Encounter- ing Smersh for the fourth, and reviewers for the fifth, time, abandoning Tiffany Case (Tine girl, but she's a bit neurotic')...

A Study of History. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Abridgement of Volumes VII-X by D. C. Somervell. (O.U.P., 25s.) LIKE Proust's great novel, A Study of History ends with the author...

Mamba. By Stuart Cloete. (Collins, 13s. 6d.) IN The Scapegoat Miss du Maurier has dispatched with a -wonderful kind of brisk, sensible self-con- fidence the sort of theme that...

Ma. JUSTICE DEVLIN'S reputation among both lawyers and public is soaring to its natural level. Current favourite in the running for Lord Chief Justice, President of the new...

Essayez. By Lord Zetland. (John Murray, 28s.) LORD ZETLAND, who was Secretary of State for India from 1935 to 1940, is very discreet in his memoirs, but lets one or two cats out...

Animal Safari: Big Game in South-West Africa. By Lutz Heck. (Methuen, 25s,) Is it ungenerous to suggest that zoologists, docu- mentary film-makers and the like who travel in...

While I was looking over a hedge into a small market garden the other day, my attention was taken by the antics of .a cock blackbird that seemed to be fluttering up and...

By IAN NIALL THE local hunt had its final meet of the season a little over a week ago, and at the same time details of the number of foxes killed by farmers with shot- guns in...

`In reply to your query regarding the little heaps of gravel in your Hampshire reader's paths,' says a lady who lives in Yorkshire, 'this is probably the work of a small...

tion has to be given to the nuisance below ground. These pests can be dealt with in spring by means of a dressing of mowrah meal followed by a good watering. Afterwards the...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IT used to be possible to get a line on the Budget from the Economic Survey, but I have rarely read one so blandly equivocal as the Survey for 1957. The...

By CUSTOS THE eve-of-the-Budget stock mar- kets were remarkable. Usually • •".. business dries up as the dread day draws near, but on Monday this week dealings rose to over...

By PHILIDOR No. 97. J. HARTONG (`Jaarbook,' 1952) BLACK (5 men) ' WHITE (6 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's problem by...

can reveal fascinatingly obscure units of measurement, e.g. 2 firkins=1 kilderkin; strikes=1 sack; 4 lines=1 barleycorn. We also hear of new scientific terms for units of...

hobby. I used to love my garden But now my love is dead,' For I found a bachelor's button In Black-Eyed Susan's bed. The usual prize was offered for a four-line epigram of...

ACROSS 1. It makes breaking up seem so remote (4, 4). 5. Increase the dancing tempo (4, 2). 9. Naturally one might make it in a pool (5, 3). 10. Leg, Sir? Fish hasn't one-or...