continue to pose an enigma. Their forces, together apparently with some North Koreans, continue to maintain pressure on the steadily contracting bridgehead round the port of...

The spectacle of the American Government ,and people deliber- ately preparing to throw the unequalled resources of their country into a single concerted effort is a formidable...

It has been said so often the main theatre of defence still lies in Western Europe that there is a tendency for the phrase to be emptied of precise meaning. But one of the...

It would be pleasant if those so disposed could spend part of their Christmas leisure in visiting a National Park. But no National Parks as yet actually exist: Dr. Dalton, in...

In the ten days that have elapsed since the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Mr James Griffiths, made his important statement tO the Commons on constitutional changes in the...

When the Socialist Medical Association, and so experienced a hospital administrator as Mr. F. Messer, Labour Member for Tottenham, who is chairman of the North-West Metropolitan...

'The Commonwealth contains no machinery for settling internal disputes. Now that both India and Pakistan have ceased to acknowledge the authority of the Judicial Committee of...

D ECEMBER 25th was a pagan festival before it was a Christmas festival in these islands, and there might seem more fitness in investing the date this year with the former...

Treasury Notes, on the ground that the present notes, being made of paper, are filthy and unhygienic. I expect they are ; no doubt my own state of rude health is due to the fact...

I should like to recommend a new victim for it to concentrate on. There are not many complete monopolies in this country outside the nationalised industries. Nearly every...

"The astrologers, the star-gazers, the monthly prognosticators "—what more impressive or sonorous a trio could be imagined? And now the astrologers of this country (they seem to...

question whether Hutton could have won the first Test Match single-handed is Yes ; he comes from Yorkshire. Someone else recalls that it was under a captain, D. R. Jardine, who...

Return from Utopia, emphasises the importance of the assistance Mr. Law might give to his party if he could spend more time in the House of Commons. Mr. Oliver Stanley's...

I consulted it at once to see how a widow of my acquaintance could get a widow's pension. It gave no information applicable to this particular case (possibly because, as I...

visit has been criticised on the ground that Mr. Attlee said nothing— or at any rate said nothing new. But what should he have said ? What was there to say ? In that case, it...

By WILSON HARRIS N D how well we know on what wise it was. He was born nineteen centuries and a half ago of a pure virgin in a stable in Bethlehem ; wise men came from the East...

M Y mother kept a diary. It was a Victorian diary, and the last pages of each year had the funeral heading: "Deaths within the year "; and there, with the date of each demise,...

By SETON GORDON S INCE we have now lost the white-tailed or sea eagle as a British nesting species, let us take heed lest the golden eagle shares a like fate, for after a...

By SU-HUA LING CHEN I N the afternoon we children always played together at home. Sometimes we got my mother to sing the old Cantonese ballads, o r we would make our eklest...

THACKERAY'S PEN1DENNIS Premising that Pendennis is just as incomplete,, just as fragmentary as its predecessor [Vanity Paid,. and therefore no more entitling its author to rank...

By six Fellows of St. John's College. Cambridge 1. What was originally meant by: a. Rival b. Protagonist. c . Tragedy d. Symposium. e. Pagan. f. Barbarian. g. Proctor 2...

forthcoming features, functions, festivities . . . focusing _festal fashions, frocks, frillies . . formulating facts, figures, feeding-facilities, fares . . . forward 441.,...

(Fantasia for forty flutes, five fiddles, fifty fifes, four fog-horns. fifteen flageolets. 9.) FIASCO-FLAP, fault-finding, flop-funk—flee! Fervour flare forth, for frantic...

. By MARGHANITA LASKI it's not as if we could do anything about It after all it's not as if we know all the facts it's best to leave it to those whose business it is it's all...

Drying a Tea-pot By DOUGLAS SPANKIE. (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.) W E are the domesticated generation, and must take our pleasures where we can find them. As the wheels...

Buis and children innocent as carols Formulate with ease an old enchantment And we remember, not events, but memories Of a white and beautiful festival Whose origin is buried...

By HAROLD NICOLSON 0 N the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday Dr. Thomas Mann delivered to the University of Chicago a lecture bearing the title "Meine Zeit." It has now...

0 UNPERTURBED and casual flowering face. 0 wild-rose tranquil hand outstretched to bless. Can that uncomprehending smile embrace All incomputable human wretchedness ? Or do our...

CINEMA a Cinderella." (Prince of Wales.) IN these days, when the fears, woes and problems of human beings are reflected in all their despondency on the screen, it is difficult...

THE SPECTATOR . readers are urged to plac,e a firm order with their newsagent or to take out a subscription. Newsagents cannot afford to take the risk of carrying stock, as...

ON December 15th the Workers' Music Association gave a concert of the music of Alan Bush in honour of his fiftieth birthday. There were examples of much of his more recent...

MucH has been said and written in public lately about the felling of big trees in the English hedgerows. Such trees are usually elm and oak, for where roads are bordered by...

so while the snow lies. All pruning is done, the lawns have been cut and edges trimmed, and most of the beds dug. What a joy it is to contemplate that tidied bareness,...

Magazine Post) Id.

because of a personal bereavement. At the bottom of the hill below my house the lane curves round a dell where sand used to be excavated. The farm, which occupies the whole...

Here, of course, the Cockney sentimentalist again emerges in this column, for what townsman, even though he may have been self-exiled in the country for over a quarter of a...

Set by D. R. Peddy Problems, whether impersonal, like the dollar-gap, or personal, like the servant problem, eternally beset the human race. A prize of £5, which may be...

Report by R. Kennard Davis By the year 3950 English has become a dead language and detaili of its pronunciation have been lost ; but the composition of rhymed English verse is...

The Mind of the Chinese sui,—it is related of Napoleon Bonaparte that, on an occasion, placing his hand upon the map of China, he said: "There sleeps a giant ; then he awakes...

SIR,—It is strange that the Western Powers, who by their recent vote at Lake Success have now recognised the strategic importance of Spain, do not consider that, by allowing...

SIR,—The fiat has gone out: "There must be no appeasement." Surely this is a very dangerous generalisation. There -are different kinds of appeasement : To buy off an enemy under...

lazy individual I was disinclined to write to you on your euthanasia comment of December 1st, even though much disturbed by it. However, in view, of the congratulations your...

SIR,—Sir Harold Spencer Jones's review of our book The Riddle of the Flying Saucers by Gerald Heard may well satisfy your scientific readers, but those who have merely seen the...

Sut,-1 feel convinced that this correspondence is developing in dangerous and futile direction. Mr. Murray-Walton's approach wa si disastrous: to use the words " intransigent "...

SIR.—I have recently been revisiting London, and I was surprised to find how widespread is the misunderstanding of conditions in the country which used to be known as Palestine....

I find a note condemning the number of tax-evasions, and later on I find a paragraph quoting Mr. Nigel Birch's disclosure of some of the money wasted by the Govern- ment. Surely...

eye and the mind. English / verdure, English culture, English comfort seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive." This is a scene in Emma. )s nearly the whole scene, the...

IN a famous passage in The American Commonwealth Bryce voiced the perplexity of Europeans at the nature of American political parties. Seventy years later Europeans are still...

“Enthusiasm": A Phenomenon Enthusiasm. A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Refer- ence to the Seventeenth and Elrhteenth Centuries. By R. A. Knox. (Oxford...

Why I Escaped. By Peter Pirogov. (Harvill Press. I as. 6d.) IN 1839 the Marquis de Custine published some observations o n his travels through the Imperial Russia of Nicholas I,...

The Novel in France. By Martin Turnell. (Hamish Hamilton. ,z8s.) " Adolphe," says Mr. Turnell, of one of the eight novels here sub- jected to the burning glass of his...

Cluniac Art ot the Romanesque Period, By Joan Evans. (Cam bridge University Press. £3 los.) MISS JOAN EVANS'S book on Cluniae art is yet another panopl added to the trophy which...

Rome. Fragments in the Sun. By Laurence Scarfe. (Hutchinson. 123. 6d.) • As subject-matter Rome is inexhaustible. Historians and travel- agents, poets and professional guides...

"Iii Stevenson could have lived his life over again," writes Mr. Elwin in his preface, "and could have returned once mbre from that inland voyage for that first glimpse of Fanny...

MR. SID CHAPLIN'S short novel succeeds almost entirely in its ai It takes us down a coalmine and - us there for one shift onl making us share not only the pysical sensation l...

claim is so large and in its application so susceptible to the vagaries of a personal opinion—that it seems rather a pity that the term has been used as a feconunendation on the...

P. Fedotov. (Sheed and Ward. 2s.) BOTH secular literature and sectarian writings have been excluded from the field of thi§ anthology of Russian—that is, Russian Ortho-...

Tins is a particularly good issue of the best of our literary maga- zines. Mr: Peter Quennell, who himself contributes an essay on Sicilian temples, has brought together short...

Everyman's Encyclopaedia. Third Edition, edited by Athelstan WITH the appearance of the two final volumes of Everyman's Encyclopaedia, Messrs. Dent have completed a thorough...

ERICH KASTNER, author of Emil and the Detectives (now nineteen years old), has written another excellent, and sometimes ironic, children's story. It has been admirably...

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p Book Token far one guinea will be awarded to the sender of she first 'correct t , ■ , :ion of this week's crossword to be opened after noon on Tuesday week, ary 2nd. ACROSS...

By CUSTOS HOLIDAY influences have now joined the uncertainties of inter- national politics in imposing strong restraints on new investment. In consequence, London did not take...