P - 1 - 1 HE slow days are dragging their sad length along to the climax, when the mortal remains of King George VI will be laid, where so many of his forbears have pre- ceded...

The Communist proposal that a " high-level " conference should be held three months after the signing of an armistice to discuss the withdrawal of foreign troops and other...

All the suggestions that M. Schuman has so far been able to offer on the problem of German participation in Western defence have about them an air of improvisation, and even of...

Anxiety in Bonn The storm over the conditions the Germans are making— or, in the language of much of the Press, the blackmail they are levying—in return for the provision of...

In view of the supreme importance of keeping British and American foreign policy as closely in line as possible it is very necessary to know how far such personalities as Mr....

" I could win this war in three months if I could get two- thirds of the people on my side," General Templer is reported to have told senior Civil Servants in Kuala Lumpur, soon...

It has now become reasonably clear that the Cairo riots of three weeks ago so shocked the Egyptian people, as well as the rest of the world, that a period of relative calm was...

Last November the Chancellor of the Exchequer took the unusual step of publishing the balance-of-payments figures for the month of October, 1951, instead of waiting until the...

The rise in the price of The Times from 3d. to 4d. is, among other things, the latest symptom of the sustained upward move- ment in the price of paper—a movement which, it is...

The sad ceremonies of the past few days, during which the nation and the world have watched the slow progression of the dead King from Sandringham, through the streets of...

in the House of Commons on the death of King George V. With what depth of feeling S. B. would have spoken on this occasion. His admiration for the late King was immense. (After...

is very unfortunate. Thousands of people would have been only too glad to pay a moderate sum for some alternative to the street as a point of vantage. But early attempts at...

to the Queen, in a slightly different field, than even the Prime Minister. From the moment of the King's death I have felt that hardly any question mattered so much as whether...

George VI in recent years there is one that I would put higher almost than any other. During the King's visit to South Africa in 1947 he was talking to a Bechuana Chief. At the...

I switched off after the memorial broadcast on Sunday night with a keen sense of disappointment. Not, of course, everything was wrong with it, but so much was. It was a great...

I N his admirable article on King George VI in last week's Spectator John Gore suggested that it was too soon -to attempt to assess the King's place among modern British...

—Mr. Attlee, let us say, or Mr. Eden—to voice a most pro- found thankfulness that the Sovereign's chief Minister at this grave moment of transition has been Mr. Churchill. That...

he published on Sunday the picture of two small boys in bathing- suits of a bygone day, saying that it had never appeared before. It appeared, in fact, as a full-page picture...

By A. L. GOODHART * " The increasingly heavy international burdens which the American people have accepted since the war (involving the New World yet more closely in the...

GOD granted him most surely to possess His peoples' hearts : what had He more to give ? Loving and loved, in them his name shall live: Thanks be to God, his Father and his...

By D. W. BROGAN C URIOSITY may not be the greatest of political virtues, but it is one in a United States senator. The conduct- ing of an investigative campaign is about the...

By SIR HENRY BASHFORD T HERE comes a time, I think, when they are about fourteen years old, when the village boys and girls of Wiltshire declare themselves as products of their...

By J. R. GLORNEY BOLTON O XFORD should not have missed the centenary of Falconer Madan. As Bodley's librarian in the First World War, he struggled to keep a lovely fane uncon-...

By EDWARD HODGKIN T . HERE are only a few things you can do about atom- bombs. You can wait for them to fall, or you can joke about them, or you can make them. In this country...

" Amen " at our Evensong's end. They are sending it soaring Those trebles unruffled and competent, sure of their key. But say, is it answered in glory by angels adoring The...

The Pride of Cobden's Yard By GRAHAM DUKES (St. John's College, Cambridge.) p ERHAPS not one in a dozen of the people who go daily to and fro in the High Street could direct...

By HAROLD NICOLSON I - HAVE acquired the habit during the last twenty years of assuming that when Mr. R. A. Butler thinks about something he is probably right. I therefore read...

The Same Sky. By Yvonne Mitchell. (Lyric Theatre, Hammer- smith.) Miss YVONNE MITCHELL, one of the most stark, staring and sensitive of our young actresses, has here written a...

" How sad he must be," exclaimed a stranger to me at Kyffin Williams' exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, and I reflected how much more often expressionism has found a...

THE ruffian-fanatic who wounded the Queen of Spain has been handed, stripped of his clerical character, to the arm of the penal law, and has been put to death. What may have...

MUSIC " IF there are a few lunatics who have been harmed by reading the book," said Goethe irritably of Young Werther's Sorrows," then so much the worse for them." Neither...

of Pont's drawings for Punch before the war there stood a statue of an Englishman holding a weird object. All you could read on the inscription on the plaque was:— " Hail to...

form of official sentimentality manifests itself in the attempt to improve the status of certain downtrodden persons by a tactful change of name : e.g., dustmen are rechristened...

The Second Elizabeth SIR,—Affer reading your note, A Stricken People, in the Spectator of February 8th, I thought I would see what John Richard Green in his History of the...

But are you not overlooking two grave dangers that threaten the nation's welfare in the long view ? A change in the age of transfer from primary to secondary schools, as...

SIR,—I should like to say, as a regular reader of the Spectator, how grateful I was for Mr. Hamilton Kerr's article in the Spectator of February 1st. It throws real...

SIR,—Having farmed approximately 230 acres of arable land for the past twelve years without the aid of a single horse, 1 feel that Robert Woodall's article, The Vanishing Horse,...

overworked. While we know that our new Queen will never shrink from the duties of her high office, is it too much to hope that she may be spared from having unnecessary burdens...

Queen Victoria, an article in the Spectator ended with the words: " When she died there was not a subject within Britain or the white Colonies who could recollect without a sob...

Stn,—In your note, Sacrifice in the Schools, you say that two things are essential: that all children of school age should be taught, and that there should be enough teachers to...

SIR,—Mr. Forecast, with charming candour, admits to not having studied Congregational Praise, and seeks instead to defend the hymn- book of an earlier—I can only presume, his...

assume that those who are interested in matters of Church order and ceremonial are somehow less concerned than he is with the necessity for effective evangelism. Most Anglicans,...

wrote: " Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, a rose-red city half as old as time . . ." and provoked the parody: " Match me such marvel save in college port, a rose-red...

was chairman of an inter-denominational group of clergy and ministers examining the question of Reunion, we came after much study to the opinion that a creed was essential, but...

which seems to be rapidly giving way to " Asian "? Is either word pejorative?—Yours, &c., Brackenbury Lodge, Clifl Road, Old Felixstowe. A.P.C. (It is understood that Asians...

Sun,--Derek Hudson's happy reference to Canon H. A. P. Sawyer will delight all old Salopians who remember " his humour, his absent- mindedness, his benevolence and sense of...

is not really " another " one. It is merely the melanistic form of the grey squirrel. Albino varieties are also sometimes seen.—Yours very truly,

A brother with interest fraternal As a gift paid my subs for your Journal. Wherever I turn I read mark and learn And of present-day news get the kernel. SAMUEL. G. TAYLOR. 4...

In the course of many excursions over the moors and into the moun- tains I have been struck with the number of derelict farms there are among the hills of Wales. Some of these...

W. H. Hudson, in his Book of a Naturalist, says how dead he found a pine wood, and what he says is right enough. A conifer wood dies as it grows, and the ground beneath the...

JACKDAWS are about in large numbers at the moment, and before many days have passed they will be taking over their nesting places once more—the chimney-pots of many houses in my...

Jim, who is employed by the farmer up the road, does a trade in manure when supplies are plentiful, as they are when cattle have been standing in. He buys a cartload from his...

A life-time spent in a particular occupation gives a man a character- istic way of handling the tools of his trade. The way old W. handled a hammer convinced me that he had been...

Thomas Tompion : His Life and Work. By R. W. Symonds. (Batsford. £7 7s. Od.) THOSE lucky enough to own this book will find themselves in a tic-toc world reminding them, maybe,...

Chamberlain and 44 The Raid " THE Parliamentary; Committee of enquiry into the Jameson Raid included, in its condemnation of Rhodes and Jameson, a censure on Sir Graham Bower,...

Tuns volume is the second of a new series, edited by Jacquetta Hawkes, designed to teach the influence of the past in shaping the life of the present. Mr. Hyams chooses as his...

Turkish Delights. By Marie Noele Kelly. (Country Life. 18s.) Now that financial restrictions and iron curtains have closed so much of Eastern Europe and nearer Asia to the...

THIS book is a serious contribution of the study of the Second World War. It sets out to be a general analysis of Hitler's strategy from the outbreak of war to final defeat. It...

Surrey Naturalist. By Eric Parker. (Robert Hale. 18s.) MR. PARKER'S new book—it would, perhaps, not be inaccurate to describe it as a further chapter in autobiography—is...

Ist r intrim 011112 H'0 L E 1.101M0130 CI U cm n NIT N le tenim.a 11 0 1 IT 1 ,0 All E areM 1 P RI El El 171 lEi 13_0 Mr-l0E11‘011mm 1 - 2 • rl El 0 ■ 100111e00 •...

IA Book . Token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender of the first correct solution opened after noon on Tuesday week. February 26th, addressed Crossword, 99 Gower...

long Down the Years. By Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis. col University Press. 10s. 6d.) Days with_Edward. By Rupert Croft-Cooke. (Macmillan. 1 ls. 6d.) STYLE in a novel is...

SomE poets, like Milton often and Wordsworth on occasion, think out poems almost completely before they write them ; others, like Shelley, jot down most fearful scrabblings...

By CUSTOS St °GET fears are now beginning to cast their shadow across the stock markets but so far the effect is seen mainly in fresh restraints on buying. After their recent...