SPECTATOR ESTABLISHED 1828 - NUMBER 6721 FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 1957 • PRICE NINEPENCE

N 0 aspect of Christianity can have been more pro- foundly shocking to the pagan world into which Christ was born than its affirmation of the funda- mental equality of all men....

UvErrrs in the Middle East have recently taken d on something of the recurrent pattern of an arabesque. Mobs out in the streets of Jordan towns, Communist infiltration, a...

EIGIIT-FOOT TORSO left in Street. —Daily Telegraph, April 13. A TEN-FOOT plaster statue of an amply proportioned woman.—Daily Express, April 13. S IT WAS duly loaded on to...

DOROTHY TUTIN is poignant in one of those frequently unworded parts which Mr. Osborne composes so skilfully for young actresses.—Harold Hobson, Sun- day Times, April 14. (THE...

B y DARSIE GILLIE Paris rTHE Queen's visit to Paris has been a more I triumphant success than anyone dared hope. What sort of importance should be attached to the occasion it is...

T may be that the atom, like other schizo- Iphrenics, needs to be led gently back to the point at which the split first occurred. From Gottingen last week came a statement of...

AFTER a few weeks of flurry on the home front, foreign affairs are catching up with us. In particular the Middle East situation again looks pretty menacing. This time it C'^``...

IT is indeed fortunate that the penalty for falling asleep dur- ing a speech made by Mr. Gaitskell is less severe than that reserved for those who sleep on watch in wartime. I...

application in public. Later that morning Mr. Lawrence applied to have the part of the opening speech relating to the 'certain evi- dence' heard in private. Mr. Melford...

Government's best friends are the leaders of the Labour Party. Their latest pious inanity is contained in a report which was 'leaked' over the weekend, that they are considering...

MR. Wino: 'Will he not, there- THE ATTORNEY GENERAL : 'The Hon. gentleman is misinformed. Counsel appearing for the Crown in the preliminary proceedings made it perfectly clear...

to reduce the number of words their readers must struggle through each day must com- mand the reluctant admiration of even the fully literate. One of the two tabloids recently...

Jack Jones's impassioned speech in the Commons, and Mr. Christopher Chataway's reporting in Panorama, there is not much excuse for ignorance of Communist technique in industry...

Mr. Butler has appointed a committee under Lord Tucker to inquire whether any restraint should be placed on the publication of proceedings before examining justices. Lord...

By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS W E must consider the story of the Resurrec- tion on its independent merits and quite as objectively as we would consider a story in Herodotus or Livy. To...

last week Mr. Robert J. Edwards stated that 'it was Tribune's power in the Socialist Party that prevented Mr. Bevan's expulsion two years ago.' Presumably modesty prevented Mr....

By D. W. BROGAN I T is, I hope, a sign of perennial innocence, not of mere imbecility, that I remarked com- placently and more than once how odd it was that I should be one day...

By A HEADMASTER We have recently interviewed Mr. John Smith and have offered him employment in the capacity of — subject to a satisfactory headmaster's re- port. We should be...

By JOHN BETJEMAN F EW people are less popular today than Alfred Waterhouse, RA (1830-1905). Oxford dislikes the Broad Street front he did for Balliol. Cam- 3ridge with more...

By STRIX I COULD not help being deeply interested by something that happened recently at York. The central figure in this incident was a forty-one- year-old burglar. At his...

I I went to the City of Jerusalem, And my feet trod in the Holy Place. There were bandages about my , knees But I climbed up the hill to the place of affliction, And I entered...

By LESLIE ADRIAN F OR those lucky enough to have an attic, it clearly pays never to throw anything away. In the last few years nearly everything that has been hoarded in the...

Amis as there are of Strix, but just to make sure. It is time an attack was made on the classics of Eng. Lit. if only for the sake of provoking reasoned defence by their...

contentions seem to be (1) that there is some absolute obligation upon Mr. Amis to bow down before the established classics; (2) that if honesty compels him to resist this...

T. Yeadon Kingsley Ands, W. F. Mandle, Edmund Crispin, Peter Green Derek Parker Pluenix NeriIle Masterman Carol Whitehead Jennifer Plowman, A. W. Dicker, Paul Ries Collin Helen...

elicited, Mr. Kingsley Amis's bull-like charge into the Sacred Cow Enclosure of Eng. Lit. has had precisely the effect he intended. 'If Pindar bores us, we admit it,' Mr. Elia...

thoroughly into the reasons why I can't write poetry. Still, if he really thinks a hair-shirt will put things right, perhaps he will send me the name and address of his...

and Suburban' this week) about the proposed demolition of houses on The Barbican in Plymouth. The arguments used by the Council in favour of the demolition of these houses are...

Euston 3221

SIR, — While I appreciate the liveliness of many of your articles, I feel I must protest against the de- plorable interview with Mr. John Osborne that you published the week...

time when roughly half our hospital beds are occupied by sufferers from mental, emotional and nervous disorders, such a calm and reasonable ex- position of present trends in...

'Anger.' From the reaction it has provoked it would seem that he has hit one or two nails very shrewdly on the head. Every generation has had its Angry Young Men and they have...

Labour Chancellor" and I a United Kingdom instead SIR, — Were Mr. Desmond Donnelly, MP, the next of Overseas Civil Servant, 1 would waste no time before joining the queue...

that one deficiency of taste can be remedied by another. Really, it is a little unreason- able to allow into one's house an observer and then to rail at him for observing,...

SIR, — In my verse review in April 5's Spectator the title of Mr. Vernon Scannell's good book is misprinted • as A Mortal Patch. It should be A Mortal Pitch.— Yours faithfully,

Sut,—it is disturbing to learn that two members of the police giving evidence in a case are allowed to do this . from the same notes. In a country where no witness is allowed...

Aden-born Arab makes it easy to understand why Anglo-Arab enmity gets steadily worse : It may interest you to know that the Govern- ment of Aden have stopped the import of qat...

read with interest that Mr. Blake considers that those Conservatives who idolise Disraeli are liable to find themselves the slaves of antique shibboleths and an outworn creed.'...

Greene wrote in a letter last week no case has ever been brought against Miss Rebecca West and them by Mr. Evelyn Waugh. Indeed in the edition of the book published by Macmillan...

as I am watching The Railway Children on BBC Children's Hour on Sundays. Connoisseurs of E. Nesbit will agree, I think, that it is by no means her best story, but because of the...

Coming Unstuck The Entertainer. By John Osborne. (Royal Court.) — Zuleika. (Saville.) THE successor of Look Back in Anger lives up to its title—it is very entertaining. As a...

APRIL 21, 1832 THERE was an alarm of fire at the House of Lords on Stmday; which was, however, soon put down. It appeared that a portion of the mattin4 which covers the passage...

(RECORDING COMPANIES: D, Decca; DT, Ducretet Thom- son; LI, London International; V, VOL) CHORAL. In the absence of any perfect version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the new...

The Lost Continent. (Aca- o demy.) — The Smallest Show on Earth. (London Pavi- IN a seventy-year-old diary 0 that happens to have ended up in my hands, the girl who kept it...

The Latin Landscape BY PETER QUENNELL N EARLY a decade before the birth of Christ, a famous Roman poet bequeathed his little country house and the surrounding demesne to the...

Ten bloody years with this quill lying Almost idle on my table, I have sourly watched The narrow summers go, the winters ride over, Awaiting always, seized in a cold silence,...

WE are all to some extent the victims of our own previous interests and experiences. It is no sur- prise, therefore, that we enjoy refighting old battles—it is also perhaps the...

`I DON'T know what we are coming to,' wrote King George V in his diary for June 4, 1914. Things had indeed reached a pretty pass. That evening the debutante daughter of Lady...

IN my schooldays:. when Mr. Ivor Brown was still the dramatic 'c of the Observer and it had not yet become ti.snionable to assume the virtue of intellectualism, like a Boy Scout...

The Puritan Tradition in English Life. By John Marlowe. (Cresset Press, 16s.) PURITANISM is one of those words with explosive emotional content about which it is difficult not...

THE author of this admirably translated little book is a Thomist and he has frequent recourse to St. Thomas's own words. His book can be thoroughly recommended to anyone who...

Quest for Pajaro. By Edward Maxwell. (Heine- mann, 10s. 6d.) BY way of inoculation against prevalent sacred- sordid Italian fiction, unattached readers might try Carlo...

In our issue of April 5 the address of the Hotel Tresanton was given as St. Hawes. This should have read St. Mawes.

Greek Civilisation: From the Iliad to the Parthe- non. By Andr6 Bonnard. Translated by A. Lytton Sells. (Allen and Unwin, 30s.) M. BONNARD is a scholar with enthusiasm, and...

same association of thoughts for everyone that it does for me. Ephemeral might be the yellow splash of sunlight suddenly illuminating a distant hill, or even some sound with...

'Talkin' about people an"orses,' said the old fellow, "minds me of poor Bill. A grand lad, 'e wass. We worked together up at Bryn an' nobody worked 'ardcr than we did in them...

in some old apple trees, and it doesn't respond to spray treatment because the fluff or wool protects the pest. Methylated spirit is the remedy and should be applied with a...

THE new edition of Who's Who in the Theatre (Pitman, 5 gas.) had better be kept out of the way of Puritans who will be astonished and horrified to find so many people engaged...

WITH only a slight suspension of scepticism it is possible to let these speculations on Helen, Sappho, Cleopatra and the heroine of Shakespeare's sonnets (Dark Ladies, by Ivor...

By IAN NIALL Two years ago a pair of missel-thrushes made a nest in the top of a"tree outside my house. It is not the sort of tree usually chosen by missel-thrushes, for it is a...

By PHILIDOR No. 98. C. GROENVELD (1st Prize, II Due Mosse, 1954) BLACK (I I men) WHITE (7 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's...

THE two essential virtues in a guidebook are orderly arrangement and unambiguous accuracy. Rome, by Y. and E. R. Labande (Nicholas Kaye, 30s.), has neither. An awkward...

SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 372 Report by C.G. Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson once used to 'be sadly plagued with a man who wrote verses, but who literally had no other notion...

ACROSS 1 Hooded graduate gets a cup, too (8). 5 The Twa Dogs'? Fluffy, too! (6) 9 It takes more than nuclear fission to get this blue (8). 10 The old approaches are so drab...

than sixteen lines from what might have resulted if Coleridge had written the 'Yarn of the Nancy Bell' (W. S.'Gilbert), Pope 'Come into the Garden, Maud,' A. E. Housman...

By CUSTOS IT is not surprising that industrial ordinary shares remained firm this week in view of the bullish account of trade prospects given to the House of Commons by Mr....

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT As a member of Sir Robert , Boothby's committee, which has been pressing for over a year for an inquiry into the financial system, I am naturally very...

`OPERATION BRITAIN' How stands the reputation of Britain overseas? I suggest that in the eyes of the rest of the world we are supreme in tradition, historic associations, old...