P RESIDENT ROOSEVELT spoke quite frankly last "Ilesday about the question which is causing so much concern here and in America—how Great Britain is to go on paying indefinitely...

Though Hungary has been much under the influence of Germany in recent months, and indeed owes to Germany her recent gains in territory at the expense of Rtimania, she has no...

The Italians in Albania are making desperate efforts to stand on strong positions to which they have retired, and they have been throwing in reinforcements which have counter-...

The decision of Marshal Main to create a Consultative Assembly to give advice to the head of the State and share certain responsibilities was probably not unconnected with the...

The Labour Party has always stood for giving a fair deal to Russia. Before the war it always favoured reasonable working arrangements with the Soviet Government whether in the...

Already before the war there was a great revival of interest among public-spirited people in the condition of the colonies, and there is every reason now why even more attention...

The general reaction of the business community to the War Damage Bill is in the main favourable, though many points are criticised and will be the subject of debate in the...

Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, the well-known Indian moderate, and the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, have both in the past week urged that the different sections of Indian opinion,...

than anything else. I have heard Lord Cran- borne and Sir Archibald Sinclair mentioned, and a host of others. One particularly interesting name was Lord Snell ; after all, he...

in a speech which was worthy of the theme. No one pretends yet to have mastered the intricacies of this vast scheme. Even Sir William Jowitt admitted that nobody yet understood...

Diplomatic Adviser to the Government, should broad- cast at all, quite apart from the merits of his actual text. Civil Servants, of course, do not broadcast as such in their...

recess : it is to be hoped that they will spend some of the long nights overhauling office methods and thinking out afresh the wide range of new subjects which war has...

The House of Lords was called upon last Monday to deliver judgement on the damages that should be awarded to the executors of a child of two and a half for loss of expectation...

Our Parliamentary Correspondent writes: The House of Commons is about to disperse for the Christmas recess, but it would not care to go away before hearing the statement on the...

It is good to hear of a reception district in which the local authorities have taken energetic and enlightened measures to provide for the social well-being of mothers and...

E VENTS are moving rapidly in France, and some of the later moves may help to explain the former. But before explanations come fact s . Unfortunately the facts on which reliance...

becoming serious, and may soon become more so. Where there are considerable aggregations of people there will always be some turbulent individuals, particularly in this time of...

has put to the Prime Minister regarding the facts con- cerning Lord Lothian's death involves questions it would be preferable to avoid, but since the late Ambassador died with-...

air-raid deaths-6,954 in September, 6,334 in October, 4,588 in November—is satisfactory, though the number is dis- tressingly high. The November figures included the inten-...

are in print, but mere contemplation of the list of pos- sible successors to Lord Lothian shows how impossible it will be to find anyone to succeed him adequately. An almost...

T HE emphasis laid by Lord Beaverbrook on a new attempt at invasion in his broadcast on Tuesday was surprising, but it is to be noted that it synchronises with the assertion by...

by Lord Woolton, not Herr

By STRATEGICUS I T was impossible last week to gauge the dimensions of the attack upon the Italian advanced position in Egypt. Its immediate objective was clear enough ; but...

By WILSON HARRIS W HEN I stopped in Shaftesbury Avenue on Thursday of last week to buy an evening paper, and the vendor told me in a half-hushed voice " Lord Lothian's dead,"...

By DR. DAVID THOMSON I MAGINE that finest flower of modern propaganda—a Nazi mass-meeting, held any time before the outbreak of the present war. The vast hall, impressively...

By LOUIS DE BROUCKERE* j LEFT Brussels on May 1 2th, counting on being able to I maintain the conflict against Hitler behind the Yser, but I had to leave for Boulogne, and only...

By W. J. TURNER T HE important but not capital town of Dreksdrokh lay at some distance from any other town of size, so that it was the principal shopping centre of a very large...

The Silence of Sibelius IT is not often that a nation consciously takes a living artist as its leader and makes him the focus of its finest aspirations. For a musician to occupy...

Secrets of Life Tans month marks the twenty-first anniversary of the issue of the first of that long series of films originally known as Secrets of Nature and now entitled...

in your issue of December 13th seems to me to have missed the point of the para- graph in your Editorial Notes of September 6th to which he refers. You then suggested that the...

[In view of the paper shortage it is essential that letters on these pages should be brief. We are anxious not to reduce the number of letters, but unless they are shorter they...

Sta,—I am very sorry to see " Janus " lending his support to that gross perversion of history, the idea of " Germany " as the aggressor throughout the ages. It is, of course, an...

policy two schools of thought—if I may use this expression—are represented. One of them supports the view that it is much too early to proclaim peace aims, and that even after...

SIR, —The people most concerned in the creation of a "new order" after victory are the inhabitants of those countries now overrun and devastated by Hitler and his cruel hordes....

SIR,—If the late Sir Henry Stuart Jones was, as Mr. Clarke says, guilty of a desperate mistake in interpreting yap* tpicria as an " outrigger " or "oar-box " built out from the...

SIR,—Your reviewer accuses Mr. Alan Hodge and myself of making " a dogmatic denial of the well-established historical fact that Clara Bow was the It ' girl." He is being a...

SIR,—About a fortnight ago it was given out over the wireless that persons other than parents could send out parcels of food, &c., to prisoners of war independently of the Red...

SIR,—A bomb has partly destroyed the seventeenth-century church of Moreton, Dorset, all the stained glass windows having been shattered. It is here that "Lawrence of Arabia "...

1848) states that it was the name of the largest sail in the ancient galley. It retained this meaning in the Middle Ages (low Latin artimonium) down to the fifteenth century...

SIR,—I shall give myself the pleasure at the end of January of send- ing to the Provost of Worcester a present of " Jews' ears "—the repellent name by which this brilliant...

SIR,—In your note " The Excesses of the Censors," in The Spectator of November 29th, you mention complaints in American newspapers of the continued suppression of the names of...

Sta,—At the end of the last war, when the Italians at length succeeded in defeating the demoralised Austrians, it was Lord Cavan's army, headed by its British divisions, which...

All manures, especially artificials, are increasingly difficult to obtain. Poultry manure is much advertised, but it seems worth recording a season's experience of it. Long ago...

SIR,—In your issue of December 6th the author of the article entitled " After Victory" quotes one by Mr. George Peel in which he is said to observe that in 1929 under Free Trade...

Unorthodox Planting Most gardeners are slaves to the calendar, many to a point of superstition. In some Midland districts many gardeners will not plant a seed before March...

A magnificent example of the hop-garden hedge, almost twenty feet high and composed almost entirely of hawthorn patched with dark rays of ivy, stands opposite another, planted...

The unorthodox gardener, taking a risk or two, can now, in fact, do a national service. He will not wait for March for the sowing of short-horn carrots, but will sow in a frame,...

For years we have been confronted with the increasing menace of the rabbit in agriculture ; in six weeks the weather of early 194o did more to solve the problem than all the...

Sta,—As you mention in a recent issue places must be found at the reception end where evacuees can live in reasonable comfort. Recep- tion authorities, however, while most...

Fungi and Men The Advance of the Fungi. By E. C. Large. (Jonathan Cape. 18s.) AT first sight fungi do not seem to afford very promising material for a book intended for the...

Sons of Sindbad. By Alan Villiers. (Hodder and Stoughton. zos.) To those who enjoy the literature of the sea, Mr. Alan Villiers is an anachronistic fortune. He is wedded not...

IT is something of an embarrassment to review a book of this kind—personal, patently sincere, yet so ingenuous as to give hostages even to the moderately critical reader on...

The Three Pillars. By the Rev. A. Ross Wallace. (Chapman and Hall. 5s.; THE problem of divinity for the Sixth Form has long perplexed Headmasters. The Rev. A. It Wallace,...

the representation of a greatly improved Anderson shelter, this volume by Professor Gordon Childe combines, as we should expect, archaeological erudition and airy surmise....

MATHEMATICS, Professor Hardy writes, is a young man's game: a creative and not a contemplative art, and so, having passed the age of sixty, he writes this apology for a life...

Fool of Tlme. By Beatrice Kean Seymour. (Heinemann. 9s.) MR. GORE has no illusions about humanity, yet one cannot dislike his people on account of the motives from which they...

By CUSTOS DESPITE the encouraging news from Egypt the stock markets are distinguished by their strength of tone rather than volume of business. Securities with a Mediterranean...

DIVIDEND OF 10 PER CENT. THE CHAIRMAN'S REPORT THE annual general meeting of Hecht, Levis and Kahn, Limited, was held on December 12th, at 19 Fenchurch Street, London, E.C....

The winner of Crossword No. House, Culmstock, Devon. ANUARY 3rd. SOLUTION ON J 91 is J. E. Browne, Woodgate

[A prize of a Book Token for one Tuinea will be given to the sender of the first correct solution of this week's crossword puzzle to be opened. Envelopes should be marked with...