M r Ian Gow astonished his supporters by failing to clear his name after a damaging story had appeared about him in the press. It was said he had threatened to resign his post...

Versions of victory O ver the past few days, ministers have begun to wear that rather solemn expression one puts on in order to stop oneself breaking out into a silly grin. The...

I s it possible to lumber gracefully? Yes: London buses do it all the time — the real ones, that is, with a platform at the rear, and a conductor. The only thing wrong with...

T he rows over the cuts proposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Nigel Lawson, illustrate how extraordinarily crude political argument can be if polit- icians wish to...

T hey managed it in time! With only hours to go before the African poten tates - were due to arrive in Addis Ababa, to attend the 20th African summit, at the seat of the...

UK Eire Surface mail Air mall 6 months: £17.?5 £17.25 £20.50 £26.50 One year: £34.50 £34.50 £41.00 £53.00 Name ......... .. Address ... .......... US Subscriptions:...

'Speaking with authority Auberon Waugh T think the Sunday Times has got to be I.the leading quality newspaper in the market because it is the best and it has got to stay the...

S ince Mr Nigel Lawson became Chan- cellor, I have given help to at least three (maybe more) writers who were composing profiles of him. I was asked Chiefly, I suppose, because...

Dhiren Bhagat I n 1967, when she defected to the West, Svetlana Allilueva was in New Delhi, a guest of Raja Dinesh Singh, a minister of state who had his eye on the Foreign...

It is a little difficult to understand the langour of the public interest in the Nile Expedition. The politicians are in- terested, or say they are, for they talk about it as...

Frances Welsh T he Soviet soldiers who defected here from Afghanistan in June and returned to Russia on Sunday, were threatening to run to the Russian embassy more than two...

Christopher Hitchens i was more stirred than I can easily say by the news that a brigade of the CIA's Nicaraguan mercenary army has named itself the Jeane Kirkpatrick Task...

Sam White Paris president Mitterrand's career has been 1 so richly embroidered with legends and calumnies, to say nothing of outright con- tradictions, that any attempts at a...

Richard West oth optimists and pessimists about the future of Hong Kong could well take a look at the recent history of Finland. The question is whether Communist China in...

George Brock O ne of the grimmest legacies of the bomb at the Grand has been the slow-dawning perception that in Ireland itself nothing has changed. In a British government...

Patrick Skene Catling Ahakista, Co. Cork There was an unexpected knock at the 1. door on Sunday after lunch. P. J. Barry, a local undertaker in his thirties with the alert...

Off with his head! Paul Johnson I first became aware of the enormous success of Channel 4's trial programme O m Richard III when I heard a group of r Ough-looking men arguing...

rr he Prime Minister's patron sa g e, Fried- .1 rich Hayek, ar g ues the case for the denationalisation of money. He maintains that competition would brin g about a kind of...

City and oining money O ur g rubby banknotes make the Treas- ury a billion pounds a year strai g ht profit. Not satisfied with that, the Govern- ment is now callin g in the...

L od g ed in my mind is the ima g e of Lloyd's underwriter Stephen Merrett leanin g out of a spacecraft with his shrimpin g -net, tryin g to catch a satellite as it whizzes by....

S nark-scholars and Carroll-crypto g raph- ers have been drawn like moths to a lamp, or Bakers to a Boojam, by my assertion (last week) that in q uirin g into Tiny Rowland is...

Sir: Since one of your corresponden t ; raised the subject recently (Letters, 1 " October), we have heard nothing further of the plight of poor General Gordon . How is the old...

Sir: I have just learned, with distress, from Jeffrey Bernard's Low life column on 13 October, that Oscar Wilde's statue in Pere Lachaise Cemetery remains emasculated. While I...

Sir: My family is grateful to you for your mention of our ill-treatment by the erratic Socialist government of Greece (Portrait of the Week, 10 November). But we are not only...

Sir: In your article 'Power to Miss CherrY' (Politics, 10 November), you state that 'we in the West think of ourselves as wiser than Africans.' I believe rather that we think...

Sir: I am researching the life of . 1 %„ W ., i ; Dunne, author of An Experiment WI' Time (1924). I would be very interested t ° , hear from anyone who knew or worked with...

Severe geology Sir: In dealing with Jimmy Reid's letter (3 November), could I point out that: 1. The decision to close Walton Colliery in Yorkshire was taken after all stages...

Sir: A reader of the Spectator for many years, I was appalled at the intemperate and shoddy attack on homosexuals by Colin Welch (Centrepiece, 10 November). I am not aware of...

Sir: At last we have a real furore about cot deaths, but only after many, many thousands of babies have lost their lives. As usual, it is up to men, the paedia- tricians,...

UnIndian Indira Colin Welch H er voice in polite discourse was soft and low, an excellent thing in woman. It enunciated in a musical monotone the progressive clichés,...

Peter Simple's triumph A. N. Wilson M anypeople in the darkest days of the 1940s were thankful to the humorists (Pont, ITMA, the Crazy Gang, etc) for keeping their pecker up....

David Sexton The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? Eileen Barker (Basil Blackwell £12) T he Moonies are not doing too well at the moment. The Daily Mail has suc-...

Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd Of Kings and Cabbages Peter Coats (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.95) T he secret of writing in the first person is to be mildly self-deprecatory....

Christopher Hawtree Author! Author! Edited by Richard Findlater (Faber & Faber £6.95; £2.951 Modern First Editions Joseph Connolly (Orbis £15) N ot having published...

Miranda Seymour In Search of a Past Ronald Fraser (Verso £.15) M ore than ten years ago, Ronald Fras- er set out with a tape recorder and a sizeable grudge against the English...

Brandon Russell 'M aking the world safe for democracy', is the much-vaunted, self-righteous justification Americans give for military intervention in foreign disputes. It is,...

Years of happiness Gregory Martin The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner Martin Butlin and Evelyn Jon (Revised edition, Yale University Press 2 vols, £125) The Later Paintings and...

Richard Calvocoressi Modern English Painters Sir John Rothenstein 3 volumes (Macdonald £14.95 each) The British Landscape 1920-1950 Ian Jeffrey (Thames & Hudson £12.95) s...

One man and his pictures Alistair Hicks Modern Masters from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (Royal Academy till 19 December) T don't want to bribe people to see my...

Turner's grave Giles Auty The Turner Prize: works by short-listed artists (Tate till 2 December) J oseph William Mallord Turner, Eng- land's greatest artist, was born in 1775...

Reassessments David Wakefield Watteau (Grand Palais, Paris till 28 January) Diderot et l'Art de Boucher a David (Hotel de la Monnaie, Paris till 6 January) o exhibitions...

Promising Henry Elwell T he great strength of the dollar, the post-Taubman honeymoon at Sotheby's and the tremendous success of the Chats- worth drawings sale at Christie's...

Cycling Peter Phillips V aughan Williams wrote his nine Songs of Travel to Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry in 1903, before he had edited the English Hymnal and before he had...

Phantasmagoria Peter Ackroyd The fact that John Irving's novels are impossible mpossible to break up and then reassemble in the shape of a film narrative does not seem to...

Folk opera Alexander Chancellor rrhe Dismissal, a six-part Australia' .1. political soap opera, is about the r i , se and fall of the former Labor Prime ter, Mr Gough Whitlam....

Confounding Christopher Edwards Mother Courage (RSC Barbican) B recht's claim as one of the 20th- century masters of theatre has always struck me as a very suspect...

Medical notes Taki I no longer suffer from a social disease. The fact dawned upon me on Monday, when I suddenly realised that three weeks had elapsed since I'd been to a...

Rocky Jeffrey Bernard Boulder, Colorado B oulder City lies at the foot of the Rockies 25 miles from the state capit- al, Denver. It is just over 5,000 feet above sea level and...

Birdlip Mirror P. J. Kavanagh A round here it is easy to think of the Cotswolds rising out of the Severn Plain like a cake. A rugged and irregular- sided cake, some of the...

No. 1347: The meaning of mean Set by Jaspistos: Somebody I know tells me that he knows somebody who keeps their Remembrance Day poppy for use the following year. You are...

Jaspistos reports: Competitors were invited to incorporate as plausibly as possible the following words in a piece of prose: gene, mud/ark, flummox, contrariwise, un-...

Holes in six Raymond Keene A fter a week of short draws and post- ponements, interest in the World Championship is shifting back to the ear- lier phase of decisive encounters....

Prize: £10 (or a copy of Chambers Dictionary, 1983 edition, value 111.95 — ring the words 'Chambers Dictionary' above) and a `Screwpull' corkscrew, for the first correct...

London, Published by the Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Typesetting by Saffron Graphics Limited, 60-66 Saffron Hill, London E.C.1. Printed by the Chesham Press...

Spectator Wine Club Auberon Waugh A cursory glance at this month's list might suggest that young Price-Beech (for it is he) has not been trying very hard. We are back to the...