I T is tempting to speculate what might have happened last week at Blackpool had the political and industrial corre- spondents in the press not exulted so gaily in advance about...

By RICHARD H. ROVERE New York The Mayor of Little Rock, Woodrow Mann, said he had never heard of such nonsense.' 'A disgraceful political hoax,' he called it. The Mayor commands...

1956 no corresponding increase was made to the annual subscription rate to the Spectator. Due to further increases announced by the Postmaster-General, to take effect from...

THERE IS, Of course, now more strain. Observer, September 8. AND SHE showed no strain. The Times, September 9.

I T will not be possible for some time to find what the Americans have been up to in their despatch of aircraft and anti-tank guns to Jordan; but whatever their game is, it is a...

By A CORRESPONDENT L ITLE Greek children enjoy pulling out the chewing gum which American sailors give them to the point where it snaps. Mr. Karamanlis's Government is indulging...

By U. W. KITZINGER C AMPAIGN styles differ here greatly from region to region. Bavaria, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein—each of them is largely a farming state. In Bavaria the...

Onward to Brighton Well, no, not exactly. As a matter of fact they sang Auld Lang Sync. Does it mean, then, that the General Council's relentless steam-roller was standing by...

THIS week's flurry of sinister activity in the Levant has proved again, if anyone re- mained unconvinced, that peace in the Middle East is likely to remain a mirage for some...

of Wednesday, September 4. In theory, you could not have had access to a copy before that time even if you were an MP or an Archbishop—let alone an editor. Most documents of a...

be able to help their inquiries.' The communiqué has appeared depressingly often in the past few weeks : and I am beginning to won- der whether it does not tend to defeat its...

of the Daily Express refers to 'our good relations with the Security authorities.' The reason, I sus- pect, why Fleet Street so rarely attacks the whole ridiculous Security...

OF THE discussions on the Wolfen- den Report in the press and on the air, that put out by Granada the day after the Report appeared was much the sanest—in spite of the...

By EVELYN WAUGH TN the New Statesman of August 31 Mr. J. B. Priestley published an article entitled What was wrong with Pinfold?' 'Pinfold,' I should explain, is the name I gave...

Mr. Geoffrey Bing's first task, on his appoint- ment as Attorney-General of Ghana, was to charge a London journalist with contempt of court. Our correspondent R. B. Browning...

Nations Secretariat and in a Nazi prison, is one of the most striking leaders thrown up by the Hungarian Revolution last October (when, rightly or wrongly, he did much to...

the need to prepare for the European Common Market, are the authorities trying hard enough to put British exports in a position to meet the challenge? A few months ago the...

UUTTH the flight of Professor Alfred Kanto- V V rowicz, one of Communist East Germany's leading intellectual figures, another page in the bitter record of disillusionment has...

By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS M R. BOWLE, let us face it, has had to do a good deal of padding to fill out this book.* A large number of pages are devoted to general history of the...

By ACKROYD AINSWORTH T wo miles away from Singapore harbour, I away from the squalor of the packed streets where some 800,000 Chinese and a smaller num- ber of Indians and...

By STRIX S EWELS are almost always disappointing. .1.3When 1 compare 640989 with 526239, or Indeed with any of the intervening editions of this indispensable publication, I am...

You Have Been Motivated . . ADRIAN By LESLIE B b EHIND the announcement the other day that a ranch of the American Institute of Motiva- tional Research, Inc., is to be opened...

Nadonalism in Russia Czeslaw Jesman, J. E. M. Arden Sweeping the Streets John Jenkins, .Rev. Nicolas Stacey Malayan Independence Prince Chula of Thailand, W. G. Scott The...

1941-1945, Mr. Geoffrey Barraclough answers people who think Ukrainian national feeling may be a force potentially disruptive of the USSR not by evidence or argument but by the...

and inaccurate in writing of Malaya as he was in writing of Hong Kong. One gets the impression that the article in the Spectator of August 30 was wcitten in Singapore and that...

SIR,—In an otherwise enlightened comment on the Wolfenden Report you go on to say that there is nothing hypocritical about wanting to clear prostitu- tion out of sight. Here, I...

August 30, George Edinger wrote of 'British correspondents whose qualification appears to be an ignorance of any of the local Asian lan- guages. .. .' May I wholeheartedly...

May I suggest that Mr. Gordon himself be invited to talk on 'Ethics in Journalism'? Such a talk would be interesting, in view of his article on what he describes as 'The...

SIR,--Identification parades are not sanctioned or even contemplated by the law and are the outcome of a private police practice. In any event an identi- fication parade is...

appointingly unhelpful. His attempted analogy with the early Fabian position surely fails. Their support of the Labour movement (at a time when it was new and malleable)...

SIR, — As an example of Ronald Knox's ready wit, to which you referred a fortnight ago, may I recall the following? A friend was staying at Mells some years ago when the...

one might presume that to plead guilty of attempted poisoning would be the least I could or should do . . . what utter lack of British sang-froid! If asking readers of the...

letter in your issue of September 6 purporting to be from me, and referring to a Mr. Findlater and a Mr. Hawkins. I shall be grateful if you will allow me to state that I am not...

no very close connection between the White Paper on Defence and the recent Russian statement on guided missiles. Yet the very fact that there is so apparently little connection...

Sia,—I read in 'A Spectator's Notebook' this week : The other day the Daily Express published an unauthorised picture of the first of the series of British H-bomb tests. Was...

THE work of the child, painting without the restraint of adult con- ventions, and the pictures of other unsophisticated, untrained people have, I need hardly say, been among the...

The Oldest Festival WHILE the festivals of Aldeburgh, Cheltenham and Edinburgh are congratulating themselves on being with us still after a mere dozen or so years of existence,...

SEPTEMBER 15, 1832 THE King of Holland is preparing to raise a new loan of 44,000,000 florins. A good swinging national debt has been found, in the case of England, so admirable...

Visas to the Lyceum and sundrY cinemas in the final week of the Edinburgh Festival yielded an odd crop of Italian films, designated all 'Italian Film Festival' in its own right,...

OF the four bad films chance has thrown up this week (it threw three good ones last week), only one is any sort of a success, because only one knows it's bad, admits it's bad,...

THE Theatre Workshop production of Macbeth (Theatre Royal, Stratford, E) is an acute case of recidivism and ought to be seen by a great many people on the Chinese principle by...

A landscape which breaks the heart And a child in a world of g hosts Tryin g to g rasp with a wrinkled hand A wistful star in the pale blue sky Scented shrubs, trees strai g ht...

Art or Philately? B Y JOHN BERGER fl ow, if at all, has photo g raphy influenced paintin g ? The q uestion is usually considered in terms of the two activities rivallin g one...

Surgeon's Journey. By J. Johnston Abraham. (Heinemann, 25s.) EVERY second autobiography is written by a prodigy—someone, insatiably pleased with him- self, who thinks it would...

Atlantis and the Giants. By Denis Saurat. (Faber, 12s. 6d.) THIS is a depressing and disturbing book, not just because of what it says, but because of who says it. It is the...

Dragon Wang's River. By Sigurd Eliassen. (Methuen, 21s.) A Traveller in Rome. By H. V. Morton. (Methuen, 25s.) HERE we have four very different personalities Writing books of...

Nero. By Gerard Walter. Translated by Emma Craufurd. (Allen and Unwin, 25s.) WHAT would a psychiatrist make of a man who could commit incest with his mother, then murder her,...

Cassino—Portrait of a Battle. By Fred Maj- dalany. (Longmans, 21s.) THOSE who had fought in Africa found the Italian campaign hard going by contrast. 'The trouble with this...

SOME books are made to be read : others to be rummaged through. In most of us the rummaging instinct is keen; and from exploring such books one sometimes derives the same...

has to do with an American jail- break, too: a planned breakaway that became an armed siege with hostages. Unusually effec- tive because of the bare-knuckled prose and the...

well-organised puzzle about whether the pilot who died in a Sussex plane crash had engineered an artistic suicide or boozed himself into his bump. Good character-drawing of...

Skin Trap. By William Mole. (Eyre and Spottis- woode, 12s. 6d.) We have had crooks, private detectives and, recently, a policeman who lived in Albany : here, at last, is an...

If you can believe that any Frenchwoman—even one anglicised by marriage and residence—knows nothing about tripe and anything about sherry, then here is an admirably credible,...

TH.E general picture presented to the outsider of theatre criticism on Broadway is somewhat Hogarthian—a few immensely powerful and sinister hatchet-men engaged on the corpse, a...

Quiet little Home Counties murder mystery, solved by village constable who is, as all too fictionally often, a cut above customary constabulary status and who gets, therefore,...

6d.) Detailed, Rififi - like ac- count of how an escape from San Quentin is manipulated, by a substitution : there is a break-in to make possible a break-out. The sentimental...

Life in Mediseval France. By Joan Evans. (Phaidon Press, 32s. 6d.) '0 HOLY God of Gods in Sion,' a fourteenth- century Englishman wrote, 'what a mighty stream of pleasure made...

Don Camillo and the Devil. By Giovanni Guareschi. (Gollancz, 13s. 6d.) As the presence in England of Africans and West Indians becomes increasingly noticeable, serious articles...

NOVELS: The Prevalence of Witches, bY Aubrey Menen (Penguin, 2s. 6d.). TRAVEL: The Overloaded Ark, by Gerald Durrell; The Alleys of Marrakesh, by Pete' Mayne (both Penguin, 2s....

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT You do not have to be a retired old colonel, or any other sort of \ crabbed, crusted Tory, to have a feeling in your bones that Britain IS going down...

By CUSTOS THE continued fall in Wall Street and the dangerous arms-lift in the ' Middle East contrived to put most security prices sharply down, except, curiously enough, the...

'"You be careful 'ow you goes apickin' mush' rooms in among trees an' sich places," 'e tole me. "A lot o' them things is poisonous, you knows," I stir pose 'e meant well, but...

ACROSS 1 Suitable sub-title for 'Called Back'? (6) 4 . . . to a general conflagration, maybe (8). 10 He makes his mark well filled out (7). 11 'Round the - bole are in tiny...

Although I am not very well up in bats they hav e a fascination for me, particularly when they apP 0 J r to like the space between the house in which I live and the one next to...

By IAN NIALL PERHAPS a person acutely sensitive to pitch and tone might not agree that there is any similarity between the hum of a combine and the sound of a beehive, but for...

Why is it, when it takes no more than six fed of water to cover the average man's head and he ma5' drown in almost a cupful, that the information tha t a particular lake or loch...

On the lines of Hilaire Belloc's Lord Finchley tried to mend the electric light Himself. It struck him dead; And serve him right! It is the business of the wealthy man To give...

all his cash in a bucket:! But his daughter, named Nan,' Ran away with a man 1 And as for the bucket, Nantucket.' The usual prize of six guineas is offered for two original...