This is nothing — you should see what they do to each other.' A bomb thought to have been planted by the Animal Liberation Front exploded beneath the car of a psychologist...

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 071-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 071-242 0603 LIGHTS, ACTION, SUBSIDIES! W hat is meant by 'the British Film...

Price! RATES 12 Months 6 Months UK 0 £66.00 0 £33.00 Europe (airmail) 0 £77.00 0 £38.50 USA Airspeed 0 US $99 0 $49.50 Rest of Airmail 0 £93.00 0 £46.50 World Airspeed 0...

The ticklish tactics of tax attacks NOEL MALCOLM T he idea of moving suddenly from mid-term blues to election fever is a worrying prospect for the Government, and ought to...

T he universities, with their genius for latching on to fashions just as they are on the wane, now seem keen to embrace what passes as `Thatcherism'. I say 'passes as' because I...

Have you had your bottom line inspected yet? AUBERON WAUGH P erhaps I misread news reports of the second great police conference on the subject of the Bogus Bottom Inspectors...

There is no longer a threat to Britain from the East. Mark Urban reviews the urgent cuts needed in British forces, and how top officers are responding FOR the British...

Patrick Bishop fears that the new government of Israel could have disastrous consequences Jerusalem IT SOUNDED like the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rather...

Diana Geddes on Mitterrand's eminence grise who is bound for London — which part is not clear Paris JACQUES Attali, the newly nominated president of the equally new European...

Michael Heath

William Dalrymple reports on the unrest and reprisals on India's border Srinagar THERE are worse assignments than cover- ing the Muslim uprising in Kashmir. In the morning the...

SOMETIMES I wish I had the wisdom of Solomon: at any rate, my patients seem to expect it of me. Last week, a husband and wife came to consult me. They were not of English...

Olivia Nicolson finds that nobody cares about her brush with Soviet police LAST month I was arrested by the KGB. Even at the time of my arrest I had the presence of mind to...

The media: Paul Johnson on right and wrong ways to dress up culture ACCORDING to the Independent, musi- cians are becoming worried by the growing tendency of record companies...

THE point about Mr Coleridge is that he is that rare creature in Lloyd's, the chairman of a substantial public company. (The Sturge group, which he heads, owns the biggest...

THAT nice Dr Pohl and that jolly Mr Kohl go well in a Euro-nursery rhyme. No doubt Edward Heath could conduct its first per- formance. It would tell how Dr Pohl looked after the...

BUSY days for my friend the barrister — a commercial silk whose arrival at a com- pany's sick-bed tends to signal that the case has been diagnosed as terminal. He is cancelling...

Change on its way to the top at Lloyd's of London CHRISTOPHER FILDES U p on the 12th floor of Lloyd's of London all is calm and bright. The waiters, serious, soft-footed...

Sir: Jo Grimond's comments on the War Crimes Bill (Diary, 9 June) are quite shocking and his special pleading on behalf of the alleged war criminals is totally misplaced. He...

Sir: I can only suppose that Paul Johnson was chosen to review the current crop of books on Vincent van Gogh (Books, 9 June) in order to irritate anyone who has either studied...

criminals to court are very depressing (Leading article, 2 June). The assumption behind them is that British justice is quite incapable of coping with the kind of difficulties...

Sir: Geographically astute readers of my article in The Spectator (26 May) will no doubt be aware that Lake Baikal is not located in Ukraine, despite a mischievous copy taster's...

Sir: I am puzzled at the paucity of know- ledge of the use of the word 'poofter'. I first heard it in 1922 when my elder brother returned from his first trip to Australia as...

Sir: James Wallis (Letters, 26 May) sug- gests that the switch of the 'High Life' and 'Low life' titles be made permanent. But surely Taki and Bernard are both working the same...

Sir: I see from my map that there is a place called Burnham not far from London on the M4. Now it really would be a long way from there to Dunsinane, further I think than...

RICHARD WEBSTER EARLIER this year, as the first anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa approached, a great many journalists and commentators spent a great deal of time...

A hungry black cat James Buchan JAMES BALDWIN: ARTIST ON FIRE by W. J. Weatherby Michael Joseph, f17.99, pp. 412 E ven when nobody much 'was reading his books, James Baldwin...

Patrick Marnham FINDING CONNECTIONS by P. J. Kavanagh Hutchinson, .04.95, pp.216 I n a recent notice of this book an Irish reviewer commented, not without a trace of...

To meet a phrase like 'pour tuer le temps' is to kill not just time but the film of usage that accretes on our words like the fur of algae mossing the stpnes of the Dordogne...

Bryan Appleyard MY INDECISION IS FINAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF GOLDCREST FILMS by Jake Eberts and Terry Ilott Faber, £17.50, pp. 678 T o start with the crushingly obvious: this...

Mark Il lis VISITING CARDS by Francis King Constable, £1 1.95, pp.224 F rancis King, former President of PEN International, has written a novel about the President of WAA, the...

A time like this - Seeing a youngish man, Say barely forty or not yet Fifty, get cut down — is to Know such a final thing, Complete, definitive, Cruel as Truth as She swings...

Juliet Townsend DON'T TELL THE GROWN-UPS: SUBVERSIVE CHILDREN'S LITERATURE by Alison Lurie Bloomsbury, f12.99, pp. 229 I t is E. Nesbit who points out that, in order to...

William Scammell A SORT OF CLOWNING by Richard Hoggart Chatto & Windus, f14.95, pp.225 R ichard Hoggart made his name with The Uses of Literacy (1957) and since then has...

Isabel Colegate FORD MADOX FORD by Alan Judd Collins, £16.95, pp.471 T here was probably always something rather absurd about Ford Madox Ford. He was first so thin and then so...

Solicitors and whitewash juries Like the food here. The family furies Talking détente preserve the tone Of old revenge. This bistro's known For noble menus, plain soothsaying....

William Green By 1898 the nature of the relationship had changed. Conrad wrote cryptically to Ford, 'I have a word for your ear', and proceeded to ask the younger novelist to...

No map exists of the familiar rooms, no armchair, tantalus, or tinsel-tree, no silver tray with its brocade of crumbs, no souvenirs of the imperial sea, no trivial pursuits, no...

William Cookson consisting in res non verba, despite William's anecdotes, in that Fordie never dented an idea for a phrase's sake and had more humanitas (Canto LXXXII) Pound...

Exhibitions 1 Seed-cake with granny Giles Auty The 222nd Summer Exhibition (Royal Academy, till 19 August) T he Royal Academy Summer Exhibi- tion is probably the hardest...

Diamond Skulls (`18', Cannon Shaftesbury Avenue) Brideshead regurgitated Hilary Mantel N oises off are important in this film. Ian Carmichael, playing a butler, has the duty...

Gasping (Theatre Royal Haymarket) The Illusion (Old Vic) Hot air Christopher Edwards B en Elton has come up with a funny and serviceable conceit through which he can satirise...

Very special enchantment Rodney MI Ines T he glee with which this hugely enjoy- able production has been greeted seems almost to suggest that the Royal Opera has done nothing...

Sex appeal Peter Phillips E vidence produced recently in the Independent that record companies are boosting sales by presenting their artists as sex symbols has uncomfortable...

Ringing round Chelsea Ursula Buchan T he Chelsea Flower Show is well known for the range of new gardening aids exhibited to the public for the first time. This year, 'Best in...

Earth, Sea and Sky: Artists of the Suffolk Landscape 1880-1950 (Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, till 15 July) Drawn to East Anglia John Henshall E ast Anglia is going quietly...

Gentlemen of the court Taki Athens w aswas very happy to see Andres Gomez beat the ghastly Agassi in Paris last Sun- day, the ghastly one being the Las Vegas twerp who plays...

Class struggle Wendy Cope T eaching brings out the best in peo- ple,' says the DES television advertise- ment. This little film features a French lesson, in which an unseen...

Understandably rattled Zenga Longmore 0 ne of the gravest humiliations life has yet dealt to Omalara occurred last week. While her mother held her down, a doctor jabbed a...

Passive resistance Jeffrey Bernard L ast Friday I went straight from my ex-father-in-law's funeral to Birmingham to appear on a television chat show about passive smoking....

THIS column rarely gives recipes: there are quite enough available already to anyone who has a few of the better cookery books and those who are too lazy to consult such books...

Something delicious for summer Auberon Waugh 0 nce again, Corney and Barrow have given us our pick of their enormous stock at prices which are very substantially under their...

Own name & address, if different: *Important note: For total orders of two or more cases in London, three or more cases outside, deduct £6.00 per case Please send wine to: NAME...

YEAR OLD COMPETITION SCOTCH WHISKY It's all about.. . Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1629 you were in- vited to supply the outline of a story calculated to appeal to the most...

Boris the Menace Raymond Keene I f there is one grandmaster in the world whom Kasparov would like to face in an extended match, I am sure it is the Soviet émigré Boris Gulko,...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers English Dictionary — ring the word `Dictionary') for the first three correct solutions...

J. A. Tyrrell, Watford; N. E. Soret, Harrogate. R S c I C O 0 T Y Y • 10ES I Is . E R A I E U R D U N N E R IS iSTER

Jean Hayes has brought to my attention this sentence from the anthropologist Pro- fessor Ashley Montagu: 'Poems have been written in celebration of every part of the body, but...

Box of delights Frank Keating T rent Bridge was a dank, damp, monochrome-dull type of olde-tyme Test match, like those we would peer at as kids on tiny 12-inch television...