A FTER a week of hope tempered by uncertainty, the prospects of a settlement in the Middle 'East deteriorated to a point at which negotiation could break down at any moment....

ESTABLISHED 1828 No. 6699 FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1956 PRICE 9d

T HE economic consequences of Suez depend largely on 11( w skilfully the Government manages to maintain confidence in the pound. Neither the direct burden on the Exchequer nor...

T HERE are many signs that the Russians may be on the brink of repeating in Poland the invasion and repression to which they have subjected with impunity the heroic people of...

By a Middle East Correspondent Jerusalem B EN-calRioN has something of Churchill's flair for the apt quotation. To the solemn meeting of the Knesset convened to hear the report...

M R. NEHRU and Mr. Menon have laid themselves open to a charge of hypocrisy by their apparent failure to regard Russian crimes in Hungary as being on the same level of turpitude...

A s the first contingents of the UN observers arrived in Port Said heartfelt sighs of relief went up from many different quarters and the tension was relaxed for the moment; but...

BY CHARL1S CURRAN S IR ANTHONY EDEN'S tumbril has turned into a band - This is not by any means the whole story; for while the Suez storm is ,subsiding the bills have yet to...

by a majority, has insisted that the usual twenty- eight days' notice of cancellation should apply to the adver- tisement bookings of the oil companies. Some of the news- papers...

Bill my sympathies are with the Ministers who have to commend it to Parliament. On the question of the reform of the McNaghten rules the Home Secretary said in February, 1955,...

THERE IS A good deal of resentment in Tory circles against those who have opposed the Government over Port Said, but it seems to be much stronger against Mr. Nuttitig and the...

is that the editor of The Times happened to be in the United States when the Israelis launched their kick-back in Sinai, and the British and French their ultimatum. He therefore...

Spectator this week) for a pilgrimage of British youth to Buda- pest as a protest against recent events in Hungary and a penance for Anglo-French intervention in Suez has had me...

a visit to Moscow strikes me as further confirmation of the man's boldness. for such visits are notoriously bad for the health. Quite apart from the tendency of people who...

much speculation. When the Suez crisis first broke in the summer, The Times reacted as if its one determination was to live down painful memories of Munich. The nascent...

BY ANGUS MAUDE, MP I T is difficult, and probably foolish, to pronounce now upon the present situation in the Middle East. For one thing, the situation existing as I write may...

control both Houses of Congress, and if Mr. Eisenhower serves out the eight years the sovereign people have commanded him to serve, he will have had an opposition Congress for...

at the gnat while swallowing the camel may seem to argue a curious lack of proportion. Soviet Russia has brutally crushed a freedom movement; while the Anglo - French...

and fain Hamilton, was published by Longmans on November 5 at 16s. It contains a large selection of features and articles, published in the Spectator during 1955, by Kingsley...

From Miss Nancy Maurice, the daughter of Sir Frederick Maurice SIR,—Lord Templewood, in his review of Lord Beaverbrook's Men and Power : 1917-1918, has shown how J. T....

By JOHN BETJEMAN T HE Central Electricity Authority, England's premier landscape-destroyer, is pursuing the same course for driving its line of 130-foot pylons from Hampshire to...

I HAD my hair cut this morning, at Monger's in Mandrake Street. If I were a methodical person and kept a diary, today's entry might include (for very little else has happened so...

partners can only grow closer together by learning to quarrel con- structively. If disagreement is not to paralyse and destroy their affection by driving them farther and...

I have now been reluctantly compelled to change my opinion of its merits. Twice, during my perusal of 'Return to Realism' I had to glance at the top of the page in order to...

Euston 3221

Professor G. R. Driver, Michael Astor, Rev. F. Marks, R. B. Kenward, Rev. G. C. Harding, 4.. Player, E. F. G. Haig and others Nigel Leigh Pemberton, Philip Toynbee Lord David...

country expresses itself in odd ways: some of it is humorous, some of it is ominous. This last week, for instance, I received through the post three letters: two of them were...

good many years, and frankly 1 am very disappointed after having read your article 'The Valley of Decision' of November 2. It is so easy to criticise, but what, may ask, would...

MP, alludes to Sir Anthony Eden's 'incredible follies.' As I write, the Middle East is quiet, and an Anglo-French police force is preparing to hand over to a United Nations...

you have criticised the Govern- ment's policy in Egypt. It cannot be easy for you to expose such confusion and I can only applaud your honesty in doing so.—Yours faithfully,...

of•the Prime Minister, and I should have thought the Spectator too fastidious to join it. —R. G. LIVEING, Commander RN (recd.), Alverstoke, Hants No one has explained why...

organise relief and to help in every way we can those who are still desperately fighting for their freedom. To propose a parallel activity, on a different level, is not to...

ten days in Budapest I would like to use every available means of impressing on the British public the horror of the situation there and the urgency of doing every possible...

SIR, —Since Mr. Fraser appears to feel guilty about the fate of Berlin I can only assume he also feels guilty about the six million Jew s murdered by the Germans.—Yours...

not quite so unsupported by evidence as Mr. iGwilym Griffith's amusing letter might indicate. And even 'ordinary laymen' like the writer have access to most of the evidence...

the wishes of the late Sir Max Beerbohm, to write his life. I should be grateful if anyone with letters or reminiscences of him could communicate with me.—Yours faithfully,...

THE SWINDLERS. (Cameo-Polytechnic.) SOMEWHERE in Dostoievski a group of peoPiC play a game in which each person has to describe the meanest action of his life. One of the...

In Time of Trouble DURING the last weeks we've been using radio as we used it during the war—the nine o'clock news particularly must have made a big come- back in listening...

NOBODY seems able to make up his mind whether Mr. Coward has finally, after taking tremendous punishment, taken the count from the zeitgeist, or whether it is the passing of the...

In the past two years Klemperer has become the world's most OK conductor. Toscanin is every lowbrow's taste, Walter every middle brow's. The highbrow, to dissociate himself from...

be taken seriously; the suspicion of burlesque kills it stone dead. The producer of The Devil's Disciple realises this; but he apparently does not realise that it must be high...

NOVEMBER 19, 1831 THE Law of Husband and Wife, by a Solicitor , is an awful work. If a man wants to put awaY his wife, let him read this book : if a woma is discontented with...

Random Ebullience BY SACHEVERELL SITWELL T HIS* is a book of wonders excellently written and produced, and one of the best examples of modern German colour printing. Never...

GUIDES AND MARSHALS: An Essay on Words and Imaginative Order. By George Rostrevor Hamilton. (Heinemann, 15s.) SIR GEORGE HAMILTON has written several studies on poetry front the...

THE MONMOUTH EPISODE. By Bryan Little. (Werner Laurie, 25s.) Tins is in many respects an excellent book. Mr. Little knows his West Country intimately, and he has combed the...

6d.) Even run-of-the-mill American thrillers carry more conviction than Mrs. Christie and her country houses. Here, for instance, is a forthright story-teller whose Inspector...

and opinionated, Nero Wolfe is the Gilbert Harding of fictional detectives. Here are three of his problems, each solved, fairly enough, by ratiocination. The come is the right...

The victim is a ferry-pilot in the North-West, as it might be Fleet- wood, and the characters are the pretty ordinary small business- men and publicans' wives of provincial...

Reads like a parody of all those thrillers that begin with mistaken identity in Marseilles, and the parcel that falls into the wrong hands, The inevitable American hero who,...

DEAD MAN'S FOLLY. By Agatha Christie. (Collins, 12s. 6d.) Snip, snip, snip, and the pasteboard characters are shaped; a tug at the strings and they conform to type—or...

6d.) Skilfully characterised trio of professional killers are commissioned to dispose of South American politico being operated on, incognito, in Montreal hospital. Very fast...

IN SILENCE I SPEAK. By George N. Shuster. (Gollancz, 21s.) THIS book on Cardinal Mindszenty and the Communist regime in Hungary is, as the publishers point out, highly topical....

Joseph, 12s. 6d.) Three murders in this well- written, sloppily conceived frolic among livery stables and a local grammar school, ornamented with unlikely rustics, but with Mrs....

Less complicated and more relaxed than usual : Queen pere, in the absence of that rather tiresome know-all, Queen fi/s, retires from the New York Police Department on reaching...

Maharajah's gift—a china roundabout—leads to various Hampstead murders solved, eventually, by those essentially nice characters, Dr. Wintringham and Inspector Mitchell. Mrs....

I Is. 6d.) Sunday shootings in Sussex, all made readably matter-of-fact by realism with which local police are treated, however odd the goings-on of the American hero imagined...

MR. NORRIS AND I . . . By Gerald Hamilton. (Allen Wingate, 15s.) THE prison at Nice is quite the most horrible I have ever been in.' It is impossible not to be fond of Gerald...

6d.) Gangster warfare in California, with a mild-mannered young architect blundering around no man's land, bumping into a blonde with a heart, as well as a head, of gold; some...

AIDED by fifteen hundred doctors and abetted by six thousand women Dr. Chesser has compiled a formidable survey of the emotional life of female England. Unlike Dr. Kinsey, whose...

Johnson has grown in stature, greatly increased her social scope, and covers an impressive emotional range. Her people are very satis- factorily a part of their surroundings;...

the fact that the gypsies who come to us in spring are moving back once again to places where they spend the harder winter months. At least two of the tribe call regularly upon...

BY IAN NIALL IN the trees across the road, a great many birds—rooks, jackdaws and pigeons—are feeding on acorns that are on the point of dropping. The leaves are falling...

THE first sign that French critics were begin- ning to rediscover what, for want of a better t erm, must be called the baroque poetry of their seventeenth century was the...

Each morning, between nine and ten o'clock, and in the afternoons from three until abobt four, for the past ten days or so, 1 have been entertained by a starling that perches in...

NOVELS, ETC. Collins Fontana Books: There's Trouble Brewing, by Nicholas Blake; The Bridge on Su River Kwai, by Pierre Boulle; A Press of PsPects, by Andrew Garve; The Dark...

BY CUSTOS THE sharp fall in oil shares which marked the end of the Stock Exchange account this week suggests that fresh bull positions had been taken up when the cease-fire...

When it is intended to take cuttings from chrysanthemums the 'stools' should be brought into the greenhouse and covered with an inch or so of mulch to encourage suitable young...

By PHILIDOR No. 76 S. C. DUTT (Calcutta) lit Prize, B.C.F. Tourney No.80 BLACK (8 men) WHITE (11 mon) Wurra to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to...

BY NICHOLAS DAVENPORT FOR thirty years—on and off—I have been using my pen (in articles and books) to warn people of the dangers of mixing oil and politics. When the Labour...

ACROSS 1 Left-wing eloquence in the workshop (10). 6 A square yard, perhaps? (4) 10 Bullfinches who are obviously celibates (5). 11 A mate for Gabriel Oak in the green-...

OVERSEAS COMPETITION No. 1 Set by D. R. Peddy The Chairman of the American Roc) Society has produced a 'Constitution of Sp( Travel' ('The earth ship should be invited land by...

Competitors were asked to cite irritating misusages of English words or phrases. EVIDENTLY one half of the world does not like the way the other half speaks. Perhaps we need an...

Dark nights are upon us, and ghost stor are in order; but not long ones ; we are 1 busy for that. Competitors are invited submit very short ghost stories of their a...