In view of all the deplorable aspects of the Seretse affair it is not conspicuously easy at this moment to refer to our responsibility for the three South African Protectorates,...

The State Department at Washington has been studiously deliberate in the preparation of its reply to the Soviet Government's Note of April 11th announcing that Soviet fighters...

I N November, 1916, Mr. Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States for the second time to the slogan " He Kept Us Out of War " (a European war). Last week General...

In a sensible and realistic broadcast last week Dr. Jessup, the American ambassador-at-large, summarised the impressions he had formed on his recent tour of the Orient and...

Although more than a month passed between the Greek general election and the opening of the new parliament, it was doubtful up to the last day what sort of administration would...

It is recognised that Dr. Adenauer has a difficult row to hoe, and his first visit to Berlin as Chancellor was no doubt an occasion of some delicacy. Unfortunately the political...

If Belgium's constitutional crisis were simply a matter of formula- finding, the offer made by King Leopold in his broadcast speech last Sunday should have been sufficient to...

The selection of Mr. S. N. Evans for the Parliamentary Secretary- ship of the Ministry of Food was one of the more surprising among several surprising appointments made by Mr....

educational conferences during the Easter week-end and since, the question of teachers' pay should have formed the subject of much bitter comment. The bitterness is justified....

Children who grew up during the war had to take on trust such amenities of civilisation as street-lighting and sign-posts, but since 1945 they have been able to prove for...

T HERE was a time, and not so very long ago, when, with income tax at a few shillings in the pound, the country treated Budget Day as though it belonged to the light-hearted...

T HE idea that the annual Budget should provide an out- standing opportunity for the free exercise of choice has fallen into disuse. This year, as last year and the year before,...

a young German whose mother was British. He paints an almost alarmingly sombre picture of certain aspects of life in Germany today not least of the alleged mistrust of the...

bulge as the result of Harold Nicolson's broadcast appeal last Sunday. The more one sees of what the Trust is doing and has done the more one deplores its inability to do more...

is the almost universal conviction that the birth of a baby in a public conveyance is an abnormal event requiring to be specially chronicled. This, I respectfully submit, is...

he has reached his own country are the result of instructions from Whitehall or result from local decisions I do not profess to know, but they strike me as petty and thoroughly...

and Bennett of Rodd from the Liberal Party has no deep significance."—Manchester Guardian, April 17th, p. 6, col. 3. • " Lord Reading's break with the Liberals less than two...

through the House, for the Chancellor to adopt a suggestion which reaches me from a highly reputable source. Let as many British bachelors as possible marry as many American...

into abstruse calculations on the balance of gain and loss when the reduction in income-tax is set against the increase in the petrol tax. The result is reassuring. With my own...

By MARK ARNOLD-FORSTER Berlin, April I T looks as if the German Communists, gleefully cherishing some dangerous illusions, are bent on putting their fortunes to the test....

1770 — I 850 By HELEN DARBISHIRE W ORDSWORTH'S contemporaries placed him next to Milton. A hundred years after his death that verdict is not contested. John Stuart Mill has...

By C. M. WOODHOUSE N OBODY knows exactly who St. George was or when he lived or how he earned his martyrdom. Like the other great figure of our national tradition whose day we...

How fair that plumed cloud appears, That shining line that hangs in air, As though some spirit of far spheres Had left his snowy footprints there. Or, a comparison to find...

By WILSON HARRIS L IKE most people who make any attempt at writing I am considerably addicted to encyclopaedias. The first I acquired —by instalment's ; I could afford no...

By OPHELIA DANE F ROM the ground floor a merry pounding of typewriters to the tune of the " Twelfth Street Rag " is wafted into the street to enliven the steps of passers-by....

The Itching Foot By ANTHONY LODGE (Wadham College, Oxford) Y OUTH is on the hive. This is not a blatant headline but a footnote to contemporary history. The English youth now...

SUBSCRIPTION RATES ORDINARY EDITION AIR by EXPRESS post to any part of the World — By Air to nearest Airport and then by ordinary mail. Canada and United States ......

By HAROLD NICOLSON W Ewere told during the war that one of the lasting benefits which would be derived from that otherwise destructive experience was that the younger...

ONE of the favourite images chosen by romantic poets to figure forth the poet's soul was the Aeolian harp, whose sensitive strings vibrated to the passing breezes and made a...

CINEMA All the King's Men." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.)- 4, East Side, West Side." (Empire.) ---6 , Jour de Fête." (CaMeo-PolyteCIMIC.) THE late Mr. Huey Long, who...

Very many bird-songs (as the B.B.C. reminds us weekly). have been recorded ; and the records doubtless should help beginners to learn songs. Yet how utterly the records fail to...

There are two beautiful Verdi recordings—Lina Pagliughi's Sul d'un sofilo, from Falstaff (Part.), and Boris Christoff's Ella giannainfamo, from Don Carlos (H.M.V.). These are...

" UPSTAIRS," say the small boys. " Inside," says the bus conductor, And how like it is, good lord, to us unhappy students. Away with aspirations to the heights, into the safe...

value of the Coco bean, that Miss Talbot and others have been urging us all to grow. " During the war I received from an American source a packet of climbing French ' Indigo'...

THE CANTERBURY SETTLEMENT On Wednesday night we were present at a meeting at St. Martin's Hall. The business in hand was colonizing notwith- standing the Colonial Office. A...

In the wild not more than one seed in "a myriad " successfully germinates, as Tennyson, the most careful of poets, pointed out in a later edition. In his first he had suggested...

LOCAL diaries are always interesting. The following comes (incidentally and in effect in a letter on other subjects) from the Hampshire-Dorset boundary. " How wonderfully early...

A very melancholy tale of the disappearance of wild flowers comes . from Staffordshire, and that from the region of the charming Masefield sanctuary which was given largely to...

of 13, which may be divided, is offered for a memoria technica jingle of not more than eight lines which might help school- boys of, say, 100 years hence to date some of the...

Report by A. D. C. Peterson Since the publication of Mr.Z. S. Eliot's version of the Electra. there has been a growing realisation that many literary works were composed by the...

Edith Sitwell's (Spectator, April 7th) attack on me and my Through American Eyes article in the Spectator of March 31st. I regret that a critic so insignificant as myself,...

S1R,—It is obvious that the Clapp mission had to select their four " pilot " development projects for reasons other than the normal economic ones by which such schemes are...

SIR, --I have read the extract from Mr. Creech Jones' article, Black and White in South Africa, which appeared in the Bulawayo Chronicle of April 7th. While I agree from...

Arabs and the West SIR,-1 smiled when a few days ago The Times magisterially (more suo) rebuked the Arabs for not doing what The Times thinks they ought to do, but'your leading...

SIR, —I cannot see why Prebendary Burnell should suppose that Govern- ment grants towards the preservation of our ancient fabrics should lead to the State claiming " a voice...

SIR, — On reading Janus's comments on The Times's " Message of Easter " one might suppose that the primary evidence of the Resurrection is the Gospel narrative. I think this...

faith hard and who are not always satisfied with traditional formularies. He is right in doing so, for Christianity must be prepared to abandon (as it has done) many...

Sta,--Mr. Cyril Bavin makes an eloquent plea that old people, who• feel That their useful life is over and that they are becoming a burden to others, should be allowed to die...

SIR,—Mr. N. R. Longmate, of Worcester College, Oxford, in his article on getting into journalism, raises a problem which deserves to be recon- sidered by newspaper proprietors...

issue of April 7th, wherein the Prime Minister is referred to as the former Major of the Lancashire Fusiliers ; it is, of course, possible that he did duty with a battalion of...

Spectator of April 14th I gave the Maori popu- lation of New Zealand as 55,000. This figure is incorrect. The latest census gives the native population as 109,000, and the...

wide knowledge of the Sudanese background, I feel that the picture which he has painted in his article, Progress in the Sudan, is too flattering. Beneath the veneer of the...

and more of the Spectator devoted to flying saucers. The human eye starts off as a highly organised bud but the central part ends up as a clear jelly. But ghosti remain—...

1907 to 1912 at any rate, as " Stroggins," and I have a caricature of him as dresed for the towpath with " Stroggins, 1910" 'written beneath it.—Yours faithfully,

further corrobora- tion of Mr. Soltau, testify that, eiven;szt far tatk. as the mid-'nineties when I was-an-undergraduate, the, Bgdleian was. called " Bodder " by some,of us.....

Sta.—Grave concern is everywhere expressed at the steeply rising cost of the National Health Service. Three ways of saving some of the £25 million spent on the supplementary...

and Dr. W. Annandale Troup on the above subject, may I respectfully suggest that neither of them deals with the question at issue; viz.:—"The right to die." Dr. Hawes objects...

in the idea that the Labour Party should attract and contain middle-class elements. Surely he is overlooking two important points—first, that the composition of the "middle...

Magazine Post) Id.

M R. ELIOT is, from all appearance, one of that class of poets who work from the " meaning " or intuition to the symbol, what he has called " the objective correlative," rather...

Retrospect of an Unimportant Life. Vol. III. By Herbert Hensley Henson. (O.U.P. 2 ss.) THIS is a very sad book. It is the record of an old and distinguished man going downhill...

The Soviet Scene Moscow Mission, 1946-49. By Lieut.-General Walter Bedell Smith. (Heinemann. iss.) To General Bedell Smith's war-time services his then commander, General...

Crown Against Sickle: The Story of King Michael of Rumania. IT can safely be said that no story in recent history has been more dramatic than that of Michael of Rumania, king...

THE authors of this book, a psychologist and a clairvoyant wild are husband and wife, are admirably endowed both by temperament and training to survey their field, which ranges...

DIPLOMAT, courtier and Carver to King Charles I, Thomas Carew is known today as the author of two or three exquisite lyrics (" He that loves a rosy cheek " and " Ask me no_ more...

Weather Lore. Compiled and Arranged by the late Richard Inwards. Edited by E. L. Hawke. 4th Edition. (Rider. 15s.) IT would be easy to write colurrins 'about this fascinating...

Wagner Nights. By Ernest Newman. (Putnam. 3Es.) HERE is a monumental work, of erudition and appreciation, rather than of criticism, which ensures to the • English-speaking...

The Baroness. By Leonhard Frank. (Peter Neva 75. 6d.) "Thoughts on the recent school of novel writers. They forget in their insistence on life, and nothing but life, in a plain...

The Watercolor Drawings of Thomas Rowlandson. Introduction Tits volume reproduces, in a way that only the originals could rival, some fifty drawings from the Wiggin Collection...

Autumn, 1949, and Winter, 294.9-co. (2s.) Forum. (Is. 6d.) THE spring number of the Cornhill is full of good things, best of all being Mr. Patrick Leigh Fermor's visit to La...

P I P PP LE OiF 0 C ,01g2 %FINAL OE AE 2,u42:1Z:1 EID 11 A 01 i III H 0 E 5 A75i5 Alt LtA IN E m E 'f; 'A•r4 U P4 R N NkeiV L EIA v E V D LI I rt0 E U T R 5 5 • pa...

ACROSS 1. Toothsome rearrangement order of the courses. (9.) 6. This medical plant must be swallowed by a little beast. (5.) 9. A tale with merit will reach great heights ;...

By CUSTOS THE City was prepared for a tame Budget and it has certainly got one. Admittedly, the Chancellor had little room for manoeuvre and must be commended for resisting the...

THIS indispensable reference book—a necessary task well done— contains full results of the polling at the recent election, together with short biographies of the winning and...

The Soviet Air Force. Eh Asher Lee. (Duckworth. 8s. 6d.) I - r is right to assume that we know very little about the Russian armed forces, but it is wrong to assume that we...