of Dodi and Diana!© D iana, Princess of Wales visited Bosnia as part of her campaign to outlaw landmines and to help their victims. At the same time everyone began talking about...

• The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL• • • • • • • • • • • • • * • Telephone: 0171-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 0171-242 0603 INDIA THEN AND NOW T here has been...

The strange universe of the Glasgow Labour party BRUCE ANDERSON T his month, the Glorious Twelfth; next month, the portentous Eleventh. On 11 September, in a referendum, the...

THE DUCHESS OF YORK T ime. The very essence of it can slip by without so much as a moment of respect. On Monday, 4 August I left a magical Tus- can farmhouse high on a hill and...

Robert Hardman explains why Diana, Princess of Wales will not become Lady Diana Fayed, and why, if she did, the royal family would be the main loser IT CANNOT be long before...

AN OUTBREAK of breaking has bro- ken out. Dr John Stables from North Creake in Norfolk writes suggesting it may all derive from the mould-breaking of the Social Democrats....

. . . and he has contempt for his party, FOR the first time since 1649 Britain is now governed by an elective dictator. I believe this apparently excessive view can be...

John Grigg on the 40th anniversary of his (by today's standards) decorous criticism of the Queen THE WORLD is obsessed with anniver- saries. Newspapers find them a never-failing...

Douglas Johnson explains why the French are so serious about their holidays Pettus-Guirec, Cotes-du-Nord THE elections were boring. The election of a Socialist prime minister,...

IN THE final paragraph of Mr Alan Clark's article last week, headed 'Pressed to Death', on how an intrusive press can drive its victims to suicide, we replaced the phrase 'Her...

Victoria Mather reports as Islington forces, under Tony Blair, seize Chiantishire OF ALL the horrors associated with a Labour victory — strikes, higher taxes, the abolition of...

1998 Diary and Wallet The Spectator 1998 Diary, bound in soft dark navy blue leather, is now available and at the same prices as last year. Laid out with a whole week to view,...

Gavin Stamp suspects a threat to Scotland's capital from New Labour's Albert Speer IT WOULD be hard to imagine a better site or better architecture. The colonnades and...

Michael Heath

. . or over £41 on The Spectator If you're forced to share The Spectator with fellow students, then you'll know how difficult it can be to track a copy down. Now you can save...

August floods and sun, pungent smells and night sounds in a rustic paradise PAUL JOHNSON W hy do we talk about 'the depths of the country'? Why not the height of the country...

It's a game of two halves Ken leaves the field and Eddie scores the goals CHRISTOPHER FILDES lien and Eddie Show, late result: Chancellor, 0 Governor 4 (after extra time)....

THERE is nothing like a nice chummy merger. Just think of the economies of scale. You can probably manage with fewer directors, though the ones who stay will want to be paid...

THESE tactics, familiar in Britain and America, are now being discovered on the Continent. Two big Bavarian banks are merging on such chummy terms that the matchmaker is...

WELL, there goes the ten-franc kir. It was delicious while it lasted and, for City and Suburban, a triumph of campaigning jour- nalism worthy to rank with the two-dollar...

SETTING off for the City this week, I find that London Underground can offer me a choice, of a sort. No Circle line trains, owing to on-going signal problems and not, as I might...

THE BULBOUS tower on its new head office in the Moorish taste has been an embarrassment to Barclays, and not just because of its appearance. It had been standing empty ever...

Sir: My erstwhile colleague James Young, who has saved me from many a howler in the past, is right to say that the words `Let them hate me as long as they fear me' were said by...

Sir: The Kirov Ballet Company has been showing the classics to full houses over the past five weeks at the Coliseum in London (Arts, 2 August). The classics clearly have a huge...

Sir: For sheer bilge, Andrew Kenny's ritual relating of the woes of white South Africans (The black and white degree show', 12 July) achieves a new low in black- bashing, even...

Sir: It seems to me that the 27-year-old Woodrow Wyatt was outwitted by Gandhi (`Even his fasts were a fraud', 9 August). Aside from the usual gentle teasing, there was,...

Sir: The Under-secretary of State for Defence in his report on the review of deductions made from the pay of officer POWs during the second world war admits that no money was...

Sir: Brian Hanrahan's argument about Palestinian terrorism and the peace process could be described as 'bombed if you do, bombed if you don't' (`The inevitable explosion', 9...

Sir: 'Sour grapes about California'? It seems more like sour grapes about Britain (2 August). Decanter magazine's tastings are held blind, and are objective, analytical...

Sir: On returning from a little rural eating in the Touraine on The Spectator's behalf, letters to you from a Mr Sawyer (26 July) and a Mr Duffy (9 August) have come to my...

Sir: Reading Jeffrey Bernard's and Jenny Forbes's comments (Low life, 5 July and Letters, 26 July) on the importance the police attach to the birth dates of victims of and...

Sir: I am the creator, writer and artist of the Captain Pugwash books and television films. My attention has been drawn to a television review in your 31 May issue in which the...

Sir: Those many actors who like myself were trained in the hard school of weekly repertory will be somewhat amused at the almost universal comments of theatre crit- ics...

be greeted with equanim- ity. The idea of Scottish ballet calls up a spectrum of rather distasteful images, from the general idea of a bureaucrat-run `cul- ture' unable to...

A case of intrusion in the public interest STEPHEN GLOVER M y first reaction to the tabloids' pub- lication of the 'Di and Dodi' pictures was that they shouldn't have done it....

Quiet flows the don Bevis Hillier LETTERS TO FRIENDS, 1940-1966 by K. B. McFarlane, edited by Gerald Harriss Magdalen College, Oxford, £17.50 (plus £1.50 postage), pp. 255 K...

Michael Vestey PANTHER IN THE BASEMENT by Amos Oz Vintage, £5.99, pp. 122 T his short novel by Israel's leading writer is a superb evocation of everyday life in a land under...

Jane Gardam THE WAITING GAME by Bernice Rubens Abacus, f16.95, pp. 249 E very human being plays the waiting game and knows it's one you can't win. Not even Matron. Not even...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 Year 6 months UK £93 £47 Europe £104 £52 USA (2nd class) $151 $76 USA (1st class) $175 $88 Rest of World (2nd) £107 £54 Rest of World...

Charles Moore THE ODD THING ABOUT THE COLONEL AND OTHER PIECES by Colin Welch Bellew, £1Z50, pp. 288 A s someone who owes his first job and much more besides to the combined...

The path of the biographer of Trelawny Is tangled and thorny. He lied about his birth, he invented his life, and with his last breath Tried to exaggerate his death. James Michie

Norman Stone THE TURKISH LABYRINTH by James Pettifer Viking £18, pp. 288 T he Spanish Labyrinth, by Gerald Brenan, is a classic. Brenan lived for years in Spain between the...

Kate Grimond SHADOWS OF EMPIRE by Allan Massie Sinclair-Stevenson, £15.99, pp. 370 H ere on the face of it is a dynastic saga. It is the story of the progeny of a Victorian...

Andrew Lambirth ASPECTS OF ART: A PAINTER'S ALPHABET by Tom Phillips Bellew, £12.95, pp. 64 M useums should not be mere store- houses of ancient data, but living organisms...

Allan Mallinson ELVIS IN THE ARMY by William J. Taylor Jr Presidio (through Greenhill), £9.50, pp. 208 E lvis died when he went into the army, said John Lennon. But Lennon...

Patrick Skene Catling LEWIS CARROLL by Donald Thomas John Murray, £25, pp. 404 W hen Nabokov translated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into Russian in 1923 he must have...

Raymond Carr PHILIP OF SPAIN I t is odd to think back to my schooldays some 70 years ago when Protestantism was still at the core of our identity as a nation. Drake was our...

Provocative and sheer good fun John Parry looks back over the festival's 50-year history: at the highs and at the lows I have had many memorable experiences at the Edinburgh...

Giannandrea Poesio says tough training helps dancers cope with the 'jungle' of the ballet world T he allegations of mistreatment made by some ex-students of the Royal Ballet...

Theodora (Glyndebourne) Sellars misunderstood Michael Tanner H andel's Theodora, really an oratorio but not problematic to stage, was the great triumph of last year's...

Life Support (Aldwych) A Lot of Living (Jermyn Street Theatre) Bedside guilt Sheridan Morley S o the old firm is back in business again: Messrs Bates, Gray and Pinter,...

Ideal Heads (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford till 14 Sept) Canova the diplomat Bruce Boucher W hen the Ashmolean Museum announced an appeal to raise three quar- ters of a million...

Speed 2: Cruise Control (PG, selected cinemas) Disaster fatigue Mark Steyn J ust when you thought it 'was safe to go back into the water ... it is! After the origi- nal...

Jibber-jabber, yackety-yak Michael Vestey H ere is the news: 'The lunatics are running the madhouse again — interest rates go up for the fourth time . . . We have a bankers'...

To Ashford with love? Gavin Stamp T ake someone you love to Lille for £49,' exhort the advertisements for Eurostar trains on the walls of the Under- ground. A bargain, as...

Selective amnesia Marcus Berkmann S oaps know no seasons. The rest of tele- vision may subside into summer lethargy but in EastEnders (BBC 1) the plot lines must prevail. The...

Watching the Cecil stars Robin Oakley I n pink Ralph Lauren shirt, mono- grammed blue suede riding-boots with tas- sels and blue velvet riding-hat, Henry Cecil, astride his...

She's staying single Taki think it was about ten years ago that A.N. Wilson repeated a private conversa- tion he had had with the Queen Mother in these pages. What a brouhaha...

A bit of hell on earth Jeffrey Bernard not disturb those with bronchial troubles. I had a dear old friend who was 76 and rapidly dying of cancer in Mytton Ward. The day...

The caring touch Leanda de Lisle Women are supposed to be natural car- ers, aren't they? Is it because we have a deeper well of pity to draw on than men? I don't know, but I...

Two into one Andrew Robson HOW often have you played a super con- tract that is wrecked by a foul trump break? Polly Duxbury recovered from the shock and condensed two...

WHEN the editor asked me to fill in the dog days with two restaurant pieces (of which this is the first) I accepted willingly, saying I could revisit some of my familiar haunts...

,,..; II ;-•, , , 4 '. SIMPSON'S IN-THE•STRAND CHESS SIMPSON'S IN•THE-STRAND Cometh the hour Raymond Keene IN 1990, in a review for the British Chess Magazine of...

-7 - u RA 0114+ ISLE OF iul uRA COMPETITION SISLIJ .,, (01014 111UI Clumsy copy Jaspistos IN COMPETITION NO. 1995 you were invited to supply some egregiously infelici-...

You are invited to write a poem about `Crime' with the following rhyme-scheme: appear, one, year, gone, paragon, day, alone, way, dismay, most, square, lost, fare, are, books,...

VV. E. .1 GRAHAM'S PORT A first prize of £30 and a bottle of Graham's Late Bottled Vintage 1991 Port for the first correct solution opened on 1 September, with two runners-up...

's 'r' iiR moo. '6 o ZIFIEMI Elinlnlailillia En Ariunrureoris ono se., Toolsii, all mu 0 , ri R pp illial 1313110 No I LICEIHEITEIALIO UTSH Eas s U RRN !NEU!) 111 C E...

Wodehouse at the crease Simon Barnes THE WORK of P.G. Wodehouse is a trivi- ality wrapped up in a frivolity inside a nugacity. And the same goes for cricket. If cricket and...

Dear Mary. . Q. As a woman, I am always conscious of whether my breath is smelling sweet or sour. However, men do not seem to 'rate' bad breath as offensive. My own hus- band's...