Few men would turn down £60,000 to carry on doing what they are already doing, and if that was all there was to it we would happily congratulate Captain Mark Phillips on the...

Ferdinand Mount Hmm. Or rather perhaps, to put it more accurately, mmh. I quote from the Prime Minister's speech at Blackpool, passim . Mrs Thatcher has acquired a habit of...

At a school parents' meeting the subject for discussion is drugs. We are invited to search the bathrooms for old syringes and examine our children's shirt sleeves for...

Auberon Waugh One of the most agreeable features of having a Conservative government is in the quality of the political waffle we read. Nobody supposes that the politicians can...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington After the controversy over the FrostKissinger tiff hit the newspapers. NBC still had so little confidence in the videotaped interview that it...

Banzer yielded, first announcing that elections would be held and then, at the height of the hunger strike, declaring a general amnesty. The unions were legalised and came back...

Edward Mortimer The National Union of Mineworkers is not the most popular organisation in Bri tain today. A widespread view, shared perhaps by some readers of the Spec, tator,...

Sam White Paris Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but they are at the moment a cause of great embarrassment to President Giscard. It is now clear — indeed he has made an...

Tim Garton Ash Sofia By the last frontier one knew what to expect. The three-hour wait. The laughable machismo of the little men in uniform. The form-filling, useless except to...

Rowlinson Carter Malabo, Equatorial Guinea Francisco Macias Nguema Biyoco, President-for-Life of Equatorial Guinea, was executed by firing squad on 1 October in the courtyard...

Leo Abse Crime belongs to the workers: the perpetrators are almost invariably members of t he proletariat and so are the most outraged of victims. By preaching uncomPromising...

Christopher Booker Without wishing to tread too rudely on Mrs Thatcher's day-dream that her government can sail on through the whole of the next decade, we must bear in mind...

The tom has been talking of libel cases this week. In the first, Mr Cornwallis West, Lord-Lieutenant of Denbighshire, prosecutes the publisher of Town Talk, one of the journals...

Sir: As a member of the post-war generation, it may be impertinent of me to ques tion the reaction of your readers to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of Max Hastings's book Bomber...

Sir: I am obliged to you for having published such a well-written, fair, and perhaps too flattering `profile' of me last week (I except that ghastly cartoon). As I was not...

Christopher Booker Scott and Amundsen Roland Huntford (Hodder £13.95) The oldest story known to man is a Quest the Sumerian epic which tells how Gilgamesh set out to the end of...

John Scott Mao: The People's Emperor Dick Wilson (Hutchinson £9.95) The China Difference Ed. Ross Terrill (Harper & Row £6.95) Inside Peking Beverley Hooper (Macdonald and...

Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd Tales from the Dark Continent Ed. Charles Allen (Deutsch/BBC £6 1 95) Some friends of mine recently celebrated the arrival of a new baby; the father,...

Peter Ackroyd The White Album Joan Didion (Weidenfeld £5.95) During the late Sixties, a phenomenon arose in the Western media; it became known as 'student radicalism'....

Fitzroy Maclean Marie Walewska Christine Sutherland (Weidenteld £8.95) On 7 January 1807 a glittering reception was held in Warsaw in the Zamek, the ancient palace of the...

Benny Green My Early Years Charles Chaplin (Bodley Head £4.95) In the time since Chaplin's autobiography first appeared, it has become obvious to the detached observer that the...

Alan Gibson With a Straight Bat Andrew Caro (Springwood Books £4.95) This is an account of Mr Packer's cricketing enterprise, written by the man who was, until recently,...

Francis King The Unlimited Dream Company J.G. Ballard (Cape £4.95) Apart from its film-studios and the trim. tamed beauty of its gardens sloping down to the river. Shepperton...

John McEwen It must say something about Leonard McComb's watercolours (Coracle Press, 233 Camberwell New Road till 16 November) that it comes as a surprise to find that the...

Ted Whitehead Up in Smoke (Plaza) Cheech and Chong are advertised as 'one of America's best-known and loved counterculture comedy teams', and in Up in Smoke (X), they have...

Richard Ingrams • One interesting aspect of the prolonged ITV strike which Christopher Booker may like to investigate at greater length in a future issue is the fact that, as...

Taki Kennedy fever, like Asian flu, is once again gripping America. Last Sunday the beefy Irish-American adorned the cover of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine. There he was in...

Jeffrey Bernard The fuss that's been made about British Leyland's sponsorship of the deep thinking, ex-Sandhurst cowboy Mark Phillips has come as a surprise to only those few...