Politicians are held in such low esteem nowadays that it is pleasant to see them pulling their weight and showing a little group self-respect. Whatever the rights and wrongs of...

Eric, or Very Little Ferdinand Mount Mr Eric Varley may yet get away with it. If anyone is sent to the Tower, it won't be him. The Select Committee's ultimatum that the...

Until this week I had never been inside a Prison. For a few years ! lived next door to one, the celebrated Regina Coeli prison in Rome which, I suppose, must be one of the most...

Mr Walker's bright idea Auberon Waugh One of the more enjoyable features of the political scene recently has been the way Mr Peter Walker has been kept out of it. For some...

Edward Mortimer Eurocommunism is back in the news. Both Washington and Moscow solemnly fulminated against it last week. The State Department reaffirmed American opposition to...

Peter Nichols Rome I sat for an hour each morning, rather early, during Christmas week earphoned in a studio discussing what was in the newspapers that day with listeners who...

Henry Fairlie Washington When we have praised Hubert Humphrey for being a good man, a decent man, a courageous man, a liberal, a champion of the oppressed and the underdog, of...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington There having been no conspicuous attempt to kidnap or otherwise detain him, James the Baptist returned to his native shores from nine dull days...

Patrick Marn ham The news of the arrest and detention of the novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong'0 suggests that Kenya is becoming an increasingly difficult country to govern. Four...

Anthony Mockler French black Africa has often exercised a certain bizarre fascination on the British observer. It is so very different from our own ex-colonies, a coagulating...

Jo Grimond Nothing could suit television news and the sub-editors of many newspapers better than the Liberal Special Assembly. It will be visible. It has no tiresome...

Christopher Booker Early in 1882, Richard Wagner was in Palermo. At the age of sixty-eight he had just completed his last great work, Parsifal. He had scarcely a year left to...

Enoch Powell I am opposed to judicial corporal punishment, always have been and, so far as I can see, always shall be. I am even more opposed to the question of that penalty in...

Treasury obfuscation Nicholas Davenport If anyone can understand the revelations of the two White Papers (volumes I and II) of the Government's Expenditure Plans 1978-79 to...

Sir: The saga of secrecy in British Steel is a disgrace. The Corporation is owned by the people of Britain. Their representatives in Parliament must have the right of access, in...

Sir: 1 was sorry to read your leading article in the 14 January issue. Your comments on the 1965 Act will no doubt be accepted as fair by a large number of people but your...

Sir: I noticed the appeal for donations to equip the Ky Anh Hospital in Vietnam, published by the British Hospital for Vietnam Committee in the classified advertisement section...

Sir: The reply by Mr Stamp (14 January) to my review of David Watkin's Architecture and Morality was a predictable one. Only a serious and intelligent essay would have prompted...

Sir: You can imagine my feelings on seeing the insulting remarks made by Mr Waugh about my husband in your issue of 31 December. I do not think it right to descend to his level...

Sir: As one who fought with the Nationalists, as a Carlist officer, on the northern front at the time of Guernica, may I make two points about its destruction (Letters, 7...

Sir: So Miss Connell (Letters, 7 January) still insists that Begin in his book The Revolt wrote: 'The massacre was not only justified but there would not have been a State of...

Sir: The Treasury refusal of a grant towards the £450,000 to keep the Gainsborough in Britain may be a tad decision', but those who wish to enjoy it can still travel to the US...

Sir: It is not easy to make out from Sir Alec Clegg's disgruntled scamper through educational history just what kind of schooling he does favour. There are many of us these days...

Sir: The truth about Sir Alec Clegg's 'educational pendulum' (31 December) is, (to develop his rather naive metaphor), that as the mechanism runs down and time runs out, the...

Russia's greatest ruler Alex de Jonge Catherine, Empress of All the Russlas Vincent Cronin (Collins £7.50) My mother, whose education at a Russian gymnasium was abruptly...

Hans Keller In the history of human discovery (not to speak of such inhuman discoveries as how best to destroy people), it has always seemed of the nature of revolutions that...

Simon Blow Edgar Allan Poe David Sinclair (Dent £6.95) Few men cantave been as badly served by their biographers as Edgar Allan Poe. Lytton Strachey's admonition that the...

Peter Ackroyd In the National Interest Marvin Kalb and Ted Koppel (Bodley Head £4.50) If politicians didn't exist, thriller-writers would have to invent them; come to think of...

Benny Green Raj: A Scrapbook of British India Charles Allen (Andre Deutsch £5.95) The owl of Minerva, so the saying goes, flies at dusk, so it is understandable that only now,...

Dada and Surrealism reviewed John McEwen Only once have I been confronted with Surrealism of the good old-fashioned sort, It Was in the snug of a ritzy hotel. I sat down and...

Merry Laughter Rodney Milnes Falstaff Scottish Opera) The Marriage of Figaro (Scottish Opera) Rigoletto (Coliseum) La fanciulla del West (Covent Garden) We have been lucky...

Ted Whitehead Frozen Assets (Warehouse) A Bed of Roses (Bush) A pint lost me the second act of one of this week's plays, but the second act of the other lost me a pint —...

Hustlers Clancy Sigal Pity the poor old British film industry. For years and years it has been a colonial outpost of Hollywood money and power. Our movie talent, our studios,...

Radiogenic Mary Kenny I once had to do a little study of the three per cent of the British who do not have, and do not watch, television. There were only twelve people in my...

Rapports Richard Ingranns Dr Kissinger and our own Auberon Waugh appear on the surface to have little in common. Yet both appeared this week on television and both were alike...

Salad days Jeffrey Bernard There's nothing that ruins a restaurant quite like a good write-up in the press. I wish to God that the likes of Fay Maschler would stick to Wimpy...