Established 1828 99 Gower Street, London WC1E 6AE Telephone: 01-387 3221 Telegrams: Spectator, London ' Editor: George Gale Associate Editor: Michael Wynn Jones Literary Editor:...

Men go on strike in the hope of getting- more money for their labour as a result. There are some union leaders, and many shop stewards and agitators, whose motives are in part...

Powell himself is sticking firmly to his self- imposed task of establishing a secure domin- ance in the House of Commons. His work in the committee stages of the Immigration...

If the Prime Minister should press on with the application regardless, and endeavour to force through Parliament before the summer recess some kind of Declaration of Intent,...

Mr Heath himself has been less dishonest over the Common Market than public ser- vants like Christopher Soames, our ambassa- dor in Paris, whose declarations to the French on...

am sometimes rebuked by friends and readers for harping on too much about the Common Market. I do not apologise. British policy towards Europe was disastrous be- tween 1911 and...

And a few minutes later, prodded that he had said on television that `no government would take the country into the Common Market against the will of the people', Mr Heath...

Catch phrases are peculiar things. Comedians like them and try hard to invent character- istic ones for themselves. Some catch on. Most don't. Occasionally there is a phrase...

The more people say 'It's not on' the likelier it becomes that it won't be on. Political speculation in high and low circles as to the people who will tell Mr Heath that 'it's...

New York Democrat and President of the County Trust Company, went to his bank one Friday morning in 1929, checked the ac- counts, and, very sensibly, elected to shoot himself....

Wednesday 21 April: Mr Vorster said that crafty President Kaunda had been in full pri- vate contact with the S African government for three years, while publicly denouncing it....

A comparison with the talks of 1962 LEONARD BEATON The Common Market negotiations of 1971 have awakened political forces which are re- markably like those which showed them-...

Real incomes are growing twice as fast in the Common Market. You want the facts about Britain's entry into the Common Market. We will supply the speakers and literature for...

1. The politician Pompidou CHARLES HARGROVE Paris It will be two years in June since M Georges Pompidou became President of the French Republic, an office which General de...

Mr Heath could have been forgiven for dreaming that France might handle Britain over the Common Market with the same patience, forbearing, and willingness to meet her three...

On academick liberty MERCURIUS OXONIENSIS GOOD BROTHER LONDINIENSIS, Your last letter, which came to Oxon in the dead Easter season, now lies before me on squire Todhunter's...

Moment of Pravda TIBOR SZAMUELY For me the recent postal strike held a very special horror: the mounting realisation that once it had ended 1 would have to read through weeks...

Where have all the hell-raisers gone? ROBERT OTTAWAY I had heard, of course, that they had to dig trenches for those leading ladies chosen to co-star with Alan Ladd, as the...

Hammond Innes on mountaineers Reviews by Patrick Cosgrave, David Hare, Denis Brogan, Leslie Halliwell and Patrick Wormald Auberon Waugh reviews a novel by Maureen Duffy Michael...

Spectator r MIMI MIN 1111•11• The Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London W.C.1 ■ I Please supply the Spectator for one year two years I Cheque enclosed r three years NAME...

`The trouble with politicians,' said Dr David Butler rather crossly on a recent radio programme, when Mr William Whitelaw and Mr Richard Crossman had reacted with goodhumoured...

When you go on holiday, at home or abroad, we can post your SPECTATOR to you each week. Send your address and 124p per copy to The Sales Manager, 99 Gower St, London wcl.

In that still interesting if neglected book, Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles, the defeat and surrender of General Burgoyne at Sara- toga on 17 October 1777 was as decisive a...

The Household Traitors John Blackburn (Cape £1.50) Vintage- Victorian Murder Gerald Sparrow (Arthur Barker £1.50) Vintage- Victorian Murder Gerald Sparrow (Arthur Barker £1.50)...

Annapurna South Face Chris Bonnington (Cassell £3.25) Everest: The West Ridge Thomas Hornbein (Allen and Unwin £3.50) We have read it all before, of course. Other mountains....

If you arc unable to obtain a book re- viewed in these columns, we shall be happy to arrange for a copy to be sent to you. Write to The Sales Manager, The Spectator, 99 Gower...

Rome in the Dark Ages Peter Llewellyn (Faber £2.75) Perhaps only Thomas Hodgkin, since Gib- bon, has seriously concerned himself with the most obscure and least glamorous period...

A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence Raymond Durgnat (Faber £3.00) Since that still-recent time when the cinema was reluctantly but irrevocably...

Recent advances in psychiatry may or may not have made a significant contribution to the treatment of the insane—I like to keep an open mind about that sort of thing—but nobody...

Charles Seaton reports: A recent 'situations vacant' advertisement in the Daily Telegraph ran: 'PAPER BAG TACKLER required. Experience with Chadwicks or B/F essential.'...

Summing up 10 Moral 11 Endear 12 Proclaim 13 Topics 15 Barathea 18 Farmyard 19 Alarum 21 Embodied 23 Egress 26 Colon 27 Exact time 28 Petty larceny. Down : 1 Dessert 2 Named 3...

No. 1479 DAEDALUS A prize of £3 will be awarded for the first cor- rect solution opened on 10 May. Address solu- tions: Crossword 1479, The Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London...

No. 648: The meanest flower Set by E. 0. Parrott: The garden season is on us. and doubtless the Chelsea show will give us many more new varieties of flowers, fruit and...

Organised spontaneity PATRICK SKENE CATLING One of the fundamental truisms of tele- vision is that it alters the quality of the events that it covers. Sometimes, of course, it...

The way it was CHRISTOPHER HUDSON Little Big Man CAA' Awl) is everything that Soldier Blue wasn't—a well-acted, continuously entertaining Western which doesn't stake out...

Frivolities KENNETH HURREN It was a toss-up on Monday whether I went to the latest production of the World Theatre Season at the Aldwych —a play by the late Witold Gombrowicz...

Face values RODNEY MILNES ter from the dreadful Sarastro. But things, as in life, are seldom what they seem: Sarastro turns out to be the goody and the Queen the baddy....

Sir: Because I am the wife of a British Ambassador now serving in a country where kidnapping is a possibility I was interested in the article by N. Pelham Wright in your issue...

Sir: Whatever he says now about its limited scope, Dr Hazlehurst's book contains four general points (summarised on pp.14-16) about the general history of his period, all of...

From Captain John Litchfield, RN, Patrick Cosgrave, Stella Fitz- Thomas Hagan and others. The last of the Tsars Sir: Mr Guy Richards, of New York (letters, 24 April) is a very...

Sir: Since I have only just seen Charles Wilson's review (10 April) of the book Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, which I edited, I hope you will allow me to...

Sir: The 'social relevance' of Rod- ney Milnes's personal attack on Alan Blyth (SPECTATOR, 17 April) escapes me, so encumbered is it with half-baked red herrings; and surely,...

Sir: The paragraph 'Mollycoddling Equity' in 'Skinflint's City Diary' (13 March) has only recently been brought to my notice, as I do not usually take your publication, so I...

Sir: Even though he may think each suitable to run a nationalised industry, for Skinflint to bracket Humphry Berkeley with Desmond Donnelly must seem as politically unpleasant...

Sir: Let's look at it from the Soviet-Leninist (or just plain Leninist) point of view. Britain, the whole British way and system, Is singularly disgusting, repulsive, for two...

Sir: R. D. Macleod's Key to the Names of British Plants, Pitman (my copy 1952), may help Peter Quince (27 March) in his need for a book about the origin of the names of wild...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Professor Galbraith, like me, dislikes the giant corporations. He has long been attack- ing them on account of their bad sociological effects. He does not...

Three excursions last week including two fairytale summery days in a box at Epsom gave a tempting taste for the leisured life and similar offers regarding Ascot will be grate-...

I make a very safe prophecy. In the next two months dog will be doing its level best to eat dog in Fleet Street. The tabloid Mail- Sketch comes out on Monday. The old Mail will...

Mr John Davies, Mr Heath's least jocose choice, has announced, as expected, Foulness as the third London airport, and if a third airport is really needed thank goodness for...

On the face of it, the Express team to fight the new war looks most provincial. Out goes the highly political animal Derek Marks. In comes fifty-four-year-old teetotal Scotsman...

Hard-pressed newshawks need the occasional titbit like the Lord Blandford-Tina Onassis divorce to keep up the jaded interests of their readers at dull times. When it is the son...

William Brandt and Co, the merchant bankers backed by big five bank money, were determined to get in early on the play in backing what they thought was to be a new go-go...

A name, they say, is wanted for the new air- port. Under Mr Harold Wilson we should have been stuck with some toadying title like Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles airport. My...

Here is my piece of odd information: since the end of World Warn the British govern- ment has been making financial contribution towards the fares of British subjects migrat-...

One of the advantages of going away from one's own part of the country, even for a few days, is that it helps one to rediscover the pleasures of the familiar. There are, for...

`For the serious sportfishing,' a German said to me once, 'what you need is the tiny boat and the huge fish.' That seemed a pretty superficial view to me. I've always known...

Fear—a unique travelling companion in our protective packaged travel world—adds to confusion for the first-time visitor to Russia. Those tales of our businessmen in compromising...

Down here in subterranea, we usually feel neglected by our more time-serving brethren in the media, neglected in the sense that they either patronise us merely for scandal and...

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