The quiet American defeat THERE IS a sense in which it does not matter much, except in terms of blood- shed, what eventual response Hanoi will make to President Nixon's...

Cheer now, pay later PETER PATERSON One could really only savour the full, rich flavour of last week's Conservative party conference by sitting there listening to the speeches...

Since airline security has been tightened up, kidnapping seems to be replacing aircraft hijacking as the main terrorist weapon. In Canada an extremist Quebec liberation group...

NOTE BOOK Never having stayed on to the end of a Tory party conference before, I did so with much trepidation last Saturday, in order to hear the Prime Minister. I liked much...

In favour of a scientific elite LORD TODD, FRS, Master (Christ's College, Cambridge) Everywhere it is evident that economic strength, and with it national stability, are...

JOHN VAIZEY, Professor of Economics at Brunel So far as I understand it, Lord Todd's argu- ment is as follows. Economic growth is desirable. It depends primarily upon science...

By 'a Conservative' Clear indications have been given during the past few months of a desire, inside universities as well as outside, for an un- equivocal demonstration by...

Party games Perhaps the most conclusive thing shown by our conference polls this year was the cathartic effect of our questionnaires on the delegates. Frustrated in their...

Solution to No. 511 (Loshinslci—IC5B1/ pR6/k7/3p4/705n1R/4n3/133802) : Q-B2, threat Qx P. 1 . . B-Q5; 2 Q x QKt. 1 . . . P-Q5; 2 B-B4. 1 . . . Kt(7)-Q5; 2 Q-QR2. 1 ... Kt(6)-Q5;...

AMERICA Spiro's deceits JOHN GRAHAM Washington DC A serious attempt is being made to deceive large numbers of the American people. The attempt is being made most noisily and...

Quebec depths lIORAG ALEXANDER The kidnappings in Montreal are the most serious acts of terrorism yet attempted by the Front de la Liberation Quebecois. The FLQ has, it is...

Solzhenitsyn - prize hero RONALD HINGLEY The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a new and im- portant episode in the continuing story of...

Clean waters? STANLEY JOHNSON It has been a strange time. By the middle of last week Mr Hugh Fish, chief purification officer at the Thames Conservancy, was proclaiming that...

The snobberies of the expense-account Left PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE at is it that makes progressive leftish intel- tuals really angry today? Is it Eton and arrow, the Ritz Hotel,...

All of a twitch JOHN ROWAN WILSON There is a monkey's paw quality about many of the medical and social advances of this century. Only too often it has happened that man has...

Mirror of the times BILL GRUNDY A certain scurrilous fortnightly journal, whose name I forget for the moment, although I believe it to be published in Greek Street, Soho, last...

Sir: If Mr Armwrighter will 100k at the underside of that part of his WC (loo is no longer a with - it word) on which he actually sits. he will see four or so small plastic or...

Sir: Your anonymous reviewer of our symposium (Right Turn) who claims to enunciate Tory philo- sophy—'our view' is, etc.—with- out caring to let us know who he is, has damned...

Sir: In your issue of 10 October, Peregrine Worsthorne writes that 'some months ago' he was 'com- missioned by the New York Times head office to write a profile of Mr Powell'...

From: Richard Body MP, G. J. A. Stern, Alfred Sherman, Colin Welch, Ralph Harris, Anthony Lewis, Donald McLachlan, Robert Not:, Chas C. M. Mower, Edgar P. Young, Andrew Hunwick,...

Some time ago I heard or read or viewed a learned man who gave it out as true that after mating, daddy spiders spent two months (I think) without a drop of brew; commending...

Sir: It is reassuring to know that your reviewer of Andrew Garve's novel Boomerang finds the Aus- tralian outback tempting. As an Anglophile (which is Australian terminology for...

Sir: I find it extraordinary that Mr (ledwyn Williams (3 October) can somehow conclude that the Prime Minister, by holding in custody someone who attempted to murder 150 people...

Sir: In welcoming Wilfried Strik- Strikfeldt's book Against Stalin and Hitler as 'a particularly important addition to existing memoir mater- ial on the anti-Stalinist movement...

Sir: Congratulations to Stella Hagan, but it is the 'educated' who are murdering the English language. When I rebuked some proletarian youth for pronouncing 'Severn' as if it...

Sir: Although the present two tier system of the Post Office consider- ably reduced its public use, it was a pity that—apart from an in- formed paragraph well in advance by...

Sir: By being so irrationally offen- sive to all who hold different views from himself, Dr Rowse's article does no credit either to his cause or to his own reputation as a...

Sir: My only suggestion to Jossleyn Hennessy (3 October—'Short pencil' in his difficulty is to form a charity, the sole purpose of which would be to collect pencil- ends and to...

No. 626: A hundred years hence Set by E. 0. Parrott: Each week the SPECTATOR publishes an extract from 'A Hundred Years Ago'. Competitors are asked to furnish an item from the...

Mysterious Speer ROBERT BIRLEY Among the many issues raised by any con- sideration of Nazi Germany, which are now beginning to be studied as historical rather than...

DAVID WILLIAMS Prosper Merimee A. W. Raitt (Eyre and Spottiswoode 90s) Carlyle, hard and shrewd in his judgment of all men except himself, met Merimee in 1851. He thought him...

ANTHONY LEJEUNE The Property Basket Robert Speaight (Collins/Harvill 63s) It is the rarest thing in the world to find an actor who, having summed up his own past career and...

PATRICK ANDERSON J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image Janet Dunbar (Collins 45s) He was a tiny man with a trick of raising one eyebrow and lowering the other which proved...

Mixed trio PETER V.ANSITTART Bowers of Innocence Geoffrey Cotterell (Hutchinson 40s) 0 Jones, 0 Jones Dannie Abse (Hutchin- son 27s) The Loss of the Night Wind Sylvia Sherry...

Problem pages RODNEY MILNES Meyerbeer is a problem. Current critical opi- nion judges him to be moribund, yet the body continues, disconcertingly, to twitch. More than any...

Sacred cow KENNETH HURREN Of all the sad misjudgments of drama criticism in our time, the most appalling, I think, was an error not of ignorant obloquy but of injudicious...

Regina!'

JOHN HIGGINS Last January Covent Garden put on a revival of ll- Trovatore which turned out to be one of the great successes of the season past. From the opening drum roll it...

PENELOPE HOUSTON There are moments in the cinema when it's a relief to get away from the pounding in- sistence of the personal problem, the feeling of being shut up in the dark...

American moods Patrick Skene CATLING Westerlies prevail across the North Atlantic, so television is sensibly helping us to brace ourselves against the storms of 'future shock'...

Mind and body DUNCAN FALLOWELL The advantage, if you can bear to call it that, of the growing use of electronic devices in pop is that it proves that such new musical...

'For some of us it's not enough to eat and talk. We want to touch one another, look into eyes, hum and sigh to each other. So we'll do this; we'll feel hurt if you don't res-...

Blackpool and the City The Conservative party conference was a stockbroker's dream. Nothing concrete was laid down. Only promises were made. And the promises were enough to...

JOHN BULL The demise of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation has a certain ring of natural justice about it. Conceived in the Ministry of Technology during the first two...

How it is like Oz was and Ink will be TONY PALMER Last week, both the Times and the Guardian announced that their prices would have to be increased 'before long'. Mr Lawrence...

No one can remember a year when the apple crop has been so abundant. My corner of England has no special distinction as a fruit- growing area, and indeed being subject to...

inhabitants of the British Isles even before the marriage of the heiress of Aqui- taine with the about-to-be-Henry II gave the region to the English crown for three cen- turies....

to miniaturise itself. Indeed it gave me a nasty turn when I picked up the first October issue in the paper-shop and saw the new, small format: the old eyes, I thought, they've...

From the 'Spectator,' 15 October 1870—Count Bismarck is evidently restless under the defence of Paris. Should the defence be protracted to the last, there would be danger of a...

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER If I was asked to name the most spectacular sight in London, I should without hesitation plump not for the Queen riding in state down the Mall, or St Paul's...

DAEDALUS A prize of three guineas will be awarded to the sender of the first correct solution opened on 31 October. Address solutions: Crossword 1451 'The Spectator,' 99 Gower...