s week's depressing trade figures can be into perspective quite simply. In 1964, the of the Tories' economic 'mess' which e present Government inherited, the trade 4cit averaged...

Almost every morning this week -the news- paper headlines have revealed new details of the largest surrender of national sovereignty contemplated by an advanced in- dustrial...

The British government asked for a new $1,000 million standby credit from the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, terms to be announced next month, after the...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGII One of the saddest moments I can remember in all my long parliamentary experience came on Monday, when Miss Joan Lestor was questioning Mr...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS Dear Bob, I read with joy and relish What critics say of Robert Mellish, How Harold's plan was to engage a Rough, tough, gauleiter sergeant-major, With heart...

FRANCE MARC ULLMANN Paris—This week France is experiencing the Poher phenomenon. A sixty year old gentleman who was totally unknown two months ago now has a serious chance of...

CZECHOSLOVAKIA TIBOR SZAMUELY 'Order reigns in Warsaw.' With these exultant words the Rusian ambassador to Paris announced, 138 years ago, that yet another attempt by an east...

J. W. M. THOMPSON General de Gaulle's ability to act in a way that is both surprising and logical evidently con- tinues undiminished in his retirement. His descent upon County...

PERSONAL COLUMN RICHARD WEST Richard West is a left-wing journalist who has recently returned from Biafra. Vietnam, Greece and the plight of American Negroes are the three...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY I remember once being driven through London by Mr Clive Jenkins in his open-topped sports car, prior to drinking lunch-time champagne in a well-known wine...

`EDUCATION' On I May- Walter Adams, Director of the London School of Economics, wrote to the two lecturers who had been dismissed for their part in the LSE gates affair,...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD By the time this appears the POstmaster General, who has been dithering for some time, will probably have _made a statement in the House on the date when...

MEDICINE JOHN ROWAN WILSON _ Years ago when I was a ship's doctor I was asked to adjudicate on a delicate matter. A protest had been made by some of the first class passengers...

A great American TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN Messrs Hamish Hamilton's posthumous pub- lication of The Birth of the Nation, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Senior, is a proper occasion...

ROY STRONG It is a long time since we had a fully fledged biography of Mary Queen of Scots, and this splendid new one by Antonia Fraser (Mary Queen of Scots, Weidenfeld and...

MARGARET LANE Quartet Jean Rhys (Andre Deutsch 25s) After Leaving Mr Mackenzie Jean Rhys (Andre Deutsch 25s) Miss Jean Rhys chooses so narrow and circum- scribed, not to say...

(Peter Owen 38s) Third world STUART HOOD Portrait of the Artist as a Professional Man Rayner Heppenstall (Peter Owen 38s) The BBC is a great Maecenas, munificent each year to...

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER Over the Alps Patrick Anderson (Rupert Hart- Davis 50s) `Beckford may not enhance Florence or Lisbon; Boswell may not bring an-additional smile to a...

C. R. BOXER The author explains that he had a threefold aim in writing this book. Firstly, to describe in detail Portuguese society as it existed in the city of Salvador...

BRYAN ROBERTSON Reaching instantly for my lethal, if only mental, machine gun, as I invariably do when confronted by intellectualised dissections of nice, easy, enjoyable...

PETER. VANSITTART Writers of history, fictional or straight, foi whatever age groups, face stiff competition,. whether from the growing tumult of urban streets, dazzling movie...

ISABEL QUIGLY -The Mouse and his Child Russell Hoban (Faber Hs) "War," muttered the father. "The dustbin, the •dump, murder, robbery, and war."' Fit subjects for children's...

BARRY COLE The Wind Has Wings : Poems from Canada compiled by Mary Alice Downie and Barbara Robertson illustrated by Elizabeth Cleaver (our. 35s) Shadows and Spells edited by...

ANTHONY BURGESS Secret Laughter. Walter de la Mare, poems chosen by Eleanor Graham (Pullin 4s) Children are, on the-whole, pretty good judges of art, so long as you don't put...

Anna and the Mini-Man Carol James (Deutsch 16s)' Poor little rich girl, friendless and for- lorn, finds a miniature man in her pocket: a dapper Lilliputian with a taste for...

BOOKGUIDE 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo Eric Carle (Hamish Hamil- ton 21s, published 22 May). A train transports one elephant, two hippos, three giraffes and so forth to the zoo: seven...

Books 18s). Readers with an appetite for period adventure will already be familiar with the excellent Mr Garfield. A generous imagination, a brisk, inventive pen, together with...

MICHAEL NYMAN Pierre Boulez—conductor elect of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, leader of the European avant-garde of the 'fifties, somewhat academic critic of today's musical scene...

Elgar Michael Hurd (Faber 21s). The story of his life and a general appreciation of this work plumped out with scraps of music. photographs and some curiously Lear-like drawings...

Come again HILARY SPURLING Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and God is a (Guess What?) (Negro Ensemble Company at the Aldwych) She Stoops to Conquer (Garrick) If, in the year...

Up the gallows PENELOPE HOUSTON Sinful Davey (London Pavilion, 'A') The Southern Star (New Victoria, 'U') The problem for the cinema these days is not so much how to make the...

ART PAUL 'GRINKE Within the rather single-minded context of the New York school of painting, a rat race which many of its most capable exponents find daunting enough, it is...

OPERA CHARLES REID On the first night of the Elektra revival at Covent Garden everything and everybody fitted, hung and marched together uncannily —five leading parts (and of...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Only a fortnight ago I was describing the re- cycling of hot money as the most pleasurable of Central banking games. I had no idea that the recent hot money...

CUSTOS Equities collapsed on Tuesday. Fears • of a further dose of credit restrictions (at the behest of the International Monetary Fund), poor trade figures and uncertainty...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL In -the few months that I have held Associated British Foods, the shares have drifted away so that I now show a small loss. I bought them (for my first...

Sir: Mr Ludovic Kennedy (9 May) has been unfortunate in the churches he has been at, when Matthew ii. 1-8 has been read. I cannot remember ever having heard verses five and six...

LETTERS From Lord Snow, Sam Wiggs, Canon H. 4. Blair, the Rev Kenneth Meiklejohn, Mrs B. E. Adams, Joy Bath, Cdr Robin Bousfield, RN, Sir Frederic Bennett, MP, Richard Walker,...

thing perfectly plain to me. He has not the slightest idea that religion cannot be communicated without reciprocation on his side. The two passages which he quotes from St...

unfortunate in never having heard the passage he quotes (Matthew ii. 1-8) read correctly. In the four parishes (Church of Eng- land and Church of Ireland) in which I have...

(9 May) has, in spite of his 'humanist attitudes,' attended so many Church of England services that he can form a sound judgment on them. A suggestion: would he ask to attend...

Sir:. Six months ago you published a letter of mine in which I said that because student par- ticipation seemed to have worked in Southamp- . ton I would advocate it as a...

Sir: Mr Thompson, on it being pointed out (Letters, 2 May) that he has made an invalid analogy, cannot avoid the fact by admitting, in effect, that he, not I, failed to compare...

Sir: Why must your Roman Catholic contribu- tors constantly snipe at those who have the temerity to be Protestant? Thus Denis Brogan (2 May) on de Gaulle's resignation—'Now...

(9 May) one sus- pects that his inward eye glistened as he pored over the first eight verses of St Matthew, chap- ter ii, which he was invited to read by his local minister last...

Sir: I hesitate to take issue with so eminent a scholar as Sir Denis Brogan ('Table talk,' 9 May) but his assertion that the Cardinal's hat was never seen in public until after...

Sir : Professor Laurence Martin, in his article entitled 'Towards a nuclear Europe' (25 April), wrote: `Mr McNamara has long asserted . . . that nuclear weapons can serve only...

Sir: In view of your past attacks on the Prime Minister one is not surprised to find the hysterical mood in which today's often manu- factured and grossly exaggerated...

Sir: For archivists of the contemporary bour- geois mind, Mr G. E. Hubbard's letter (2 May), with its dithering liberal uncertainty about who is being 'quite serious,' and Mr...

Sir: Your correspondent Mr Barry Humphries in his review of M lumen's Oscar Wilde (9 May) misquotes. The full quatrain misrecalled by his elderly actor in Australia runs as...

Sir: In my article on Northern Ireland (9 May), I said that the new Minister of Development, Mr Brian Faulkner, 'was not in the rebel group which campaigned incessantly for a...

Sir: I suppose I owe you some kind of apology about the libel settlement you have reached with Private Eye whereby you insist that all proposed future references to the...

Sir: The suggestion that trade unions should be made liable to damages for breaking agree- ments has been countered by the argument that this would not have any effect on the...

Sir: Mr Cosgrave (Letters. 9 May) thinks that he has revealed a dark secret by which he can explain away my criticism of Mr Anglo's book on Machiavelli (2 May). He assumes that...

Sir: Despite Dr Kennedy Holland's intem- perate outburst (Letters, 2 May), one does wonder what Mr Capitanchik has done to throw her. I am not here concerned with the pros and...

Sir: In his extraordinary letter (2 May) Mr Wilde accuses me of obscuring the issue of co- educational colleges by 'clever use of the red rag of academic freedom.' I. should...

Sir: It was a pleasure to read Lord Chandos's masterly evisceration of that pretentious and pompous piece Soldiers (9 May). Is it, however, unreasonable, to ask why and bow it...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOAN WELLS It seemed, writes our Heavenly City Corre- Apondent, Psi Factor, as if it would go on for ever and ever. Secure in the breathless peach of a timeless...

Canadian House of Commons has taken the earliest oppor- tunity of expressing its views on the relations between Great Britain and America. On the 26th of April Mr. Galt made a...

COMPETITION John Aubrey, alive, well and performing nightly at the Criterion thealre, Piccadilly, must un- doubtedly have something pertinent to add to the hagiographical...

Trevor Grove reports: It was announced a fortnight ago that seventeen previously un- published short stories by the late Somerset Maugham are to appear in America later this...

PHILIDOR Black White 9 men 8 men W. A. Shinkman (Jamaica Gleaner, January 1885). White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 438 ((Chepishny and...

1 Across Second-hand dealer looks as though he has even less than before (6) 4 Vessels that cut it short? (8) 10 The savage tabby strikes (4-3) 11 How the family tells all? (7)...