After more than two years of discussion between Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, it has been agreed that the armed forces of these three nations will exchange...

B AD luck seems to be conspiring with bad management to make the groundnut prospect in East Africa gloomier than ever. The two must not be confused. Bad management must not be...

Mao Tse-tung is in Moscow and Chiang Kai-shek is in Formosa, , Hence it has been announced that the Nationalist navy is to begin mining all Communist-held ports on the China...

When Sir Hartley Shawcross, speaking at Brighton on Sunday, suggested that wages should be linked more closely with production and that less importance should be attached to...

It is hardly surprising that the section which has attracted most attention in the latest edition of that great authority, Jane's Fight- ing Ships, is the one dealing with the...

The article on another page on the Holy Year and what it means to Roman Catholics will be read with keen interest, and possibly, in parts, with some concern. The Holy Year...

On Saturday last the television map of England showed for the first time, beside the area surrounding Alexandra Palace, a second roughly circular region with its centre at...

The men and women who wander through the parks of London normally give the impression of being a well-behaved lot of citizens. They keep off the grass when notices tell them to,...

B ROADCASTING on the Week in Westminster last Saturday Brigadier Prior Palmer observed that he could have wished the House of Commons, with Christmas so near at hand, had ended...

Drinking Fountain in Parliament Square would not till last week have ranked high. Many millions of people in these islands, even some millions in London itself, had never heard...

the von Manstein case and the sentence of eighteen years—on a man of 62 that followed it. The whole trial was plainly a mistake. Of course a logical case can be made for it, but...

charity, I shall leave the Observer's continued and astonishing manipulation of financial statistics without further comment. The Manchester Guardian, moreover, dealt with the...

and Cannon Street station, must be heartbreaking for archaeologists. The clearing of a bombed site preparatory to the erection of a block of office buildings is bringing to...

M STALIN is seventy this week. It is an interesting milestone in the Russian Dictator's career, and a good . deal has been written about it in the English Press already. But no...

lacteal element in the famous Bristol Milk sherry recalls the case of a rigidly teetotal visitor to a Cambridge college who was asked if he would take milk punch. That was...

By SIR FREDERIC BARTLETT* B ROADLY speaking, incentives work in two ways, though sometimes the two are combined. They may prolong activity or they may intensify activity. All...

By SIR EVELYN WRENCH W HILE in America, from which I have just returned after three months' travel from New Brunswick to Southern Georgia, I received a letter from an English...

OVER the rim of the world the Ship of the world This night to harbour comes, to rest, to rest. Look, for the sails on the horizon fill With the following winds, and cresting...

It% H. II. CIBBON W E used to go in cloth caps or bowlers ; we ate ham- sandwiches (the death of many a pig has borne secret reference to a wedding impending in the family); we...

By six Fellows of St. John's College, Cambridge 1. Where were the following buried: a. Robert of Normandy. b. Eleanor of Castille. c. James 11. d. Karl Marx. e. A. E....

By REGINALD COLBY I MET Mossiakoff first at a party given by some Germans in the American sector early in 1946. He gave me a great bear-like grip, and we drank a toast to...

By JOHN BAUGH E RSKINE flung out of the office of the Party's Divisional Secretary in a temper. He descended the steps two at a time, and charged out of the door on to the...

Don Jan By G. F. MAGEE (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) j ANALI was brought up in the twelfth century among the mountains of Western Persia, and came to Oxford in 194- to...

By HAROLD NICOLSON L ONDON is seen at its best perhaps on winter evenings. The river mists creep up to veil the architecture and to aureole the long line of street lamps,...

THEATRE 44 Murder at the Vicarage." By Agatha Christie. (Playhouse.) AN odour of sanctity seems to be de rigueur for stage murderers. Last week we flushed one in a convent ;...

THE performance of Lohengrin at Covent Garden on Decem- ber 15th was like meeting an old, half-forgotten friend. By general consent of the perfect Wagnerites, this is a...

“ A Handful of Rice." (Studio One.) — " Jolson Sings Again." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.) THIS is always a very difficult week in which to review films—at any rate if...

Most' people will want to see Eugene Berman's felicitously baroque theatre designs at the Hanover Gallery, and it would be a pity to miss the most recent of those little mixed...

Television (also on Christmas Eve) has the Coventry Nativity Play. 1 salute, by the way, Mr. Philip Harben, who always makes a good job of his television cookery programmes, and...

Canada (Canadian M a/inc Po .1) Id.

This week ends, on its top note, with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, from King's College, Cambridge. "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," cried those...

Christmas-time the B.B.C. did not give us Christmas programmes, we should feel a little starved ; which robs us of the right to complain that we feel a little satiated. The only...

The heart's voice is unchanged from the beginning. What is there more to say than here is told ? What melody is missed—except a singing Heard on a - midnight in a Syrian fold ?...

MY favourite American magazine, which records in highlights the mores of the U.S.A., chronicles: Never before had Santa Claus worked so hard to give U.S. retailers a merry...

SPECTATOR by AIR to any part of THE WORLD Send for list of char g es to THE SPECTATOR, 99 Gower Street, London, W.C.1.

Freedom in Medicine SIR,—Ono writer has defined freedom in medicine as " freedom to function as doctors in response to the demands of our patients." If one adds "as free...

Stg.—In her excellent article on the nurse's health Dr. Margaret Jackson did not deal very fully with the'nurse's recreation. I think it is true that, generally speaking, life...

Sta.—Janus suggests that it would be worth while devising some better arrangement about the Speakership. At present there is no constitutional ruling that this office must be...

SIR.—Canon Lloyd's stimulating and provocative article in the Spectator of December 2nd invites one or two comments. The trouble about so much writing on this subject is that...

Sia.—Now that we are on the threshold of a general election, would this not be a possible moment for the political parties in the national interest to agree, through the usual...

Sta.—Today I have reached the age of 65. But there is no pension for me, because I have not been paying contributions for ten years. More- over, I find that because I have no...

SIR. —In commenting on the task assigned to the Trusteeship Council to make of Jerusalem an international enclave, you state that " in drafting a statute for the area it will...

Sm.—It is a thousand pities that " A Rector Who Has Done Full - limo Teaching " should, hpwever unintentionally, obscure an important issue. Let us concede at once that the...

SIR.—Do not the opening sentences of the article by Mr. W. R. Moss, No Jobs for the Boys, in the Spectator of December 2nd: "To gel a degree. To the undergraduate that is the...

of weather Shay ensue, was unusually rich in both flower and berry. I picked the first blossom of the lovely and, in appearance, most delicate iris stylosa on December 9th. The...

I see that a naturalist's query has been put forth on the subject of trout and other fish left stranded by floods. Now in the parish register of a Huntingdonshire church is...

THOSE who adorn their Christmas with mistletoe (viscum) may be advised to look a little way into the botany of this queer shrub, which is unique in habit, though there are a...

slit.-1 see in the Spectator of December 9th, in the correspondence columns, the heading " The Blot in the Scutcheon." I quite realise that scutcheon " is a shortened form of...

had an escape. The Globe quotes the narra- I ftive from the Bucks Herald of Saturday. " A few days ago His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, was per- mitted to accompany his...

Sic —Surely your reviewer has slipped up in his comments on Dean Inge's Diary in attributing the remark about clerical moustaches to George V. It was made, I think, by Edward...

f,sift,—May I add to your probably voluminous correspondence on "The Dlot in the Scutcheon "? As another English exile I, like Mr. Gresham, 'derive much pleasure from my...

certain number of wild flowers in our gardens ; and these should include the so-called foetid iris, to be found in mass on the dunes of north Devon among many other places. It...

Proust Again The Mind of Proust . A Detailed Interpretation of 44A la Recherche du Temps Perdu." By F. C. Green. (Cambridge Universit% Press. I ss.) The Veiled Wanderer. By...

MOST of the books the economic historian sets store by al unfinished. They are the slender, posthumous children of schoi. , r —like Arnold Toynbee, George Unwin and Eileen...

No Cause tor Alarm. By Virginia Cowlcs. (Iianthh Hamilton. cs.) "THE batsman, armed with a flat-bladed club twice as broad as a baseball bat, strikes without apparent effort or...

Literature, appearing just after the last war, to remind even Americans that Herman Melville was a classic. Since then the mystic author of Molly Dick has won his deserved...

Soviet Genetics and World Science, Lysenko and the Meaning of PROFESSOR HUXLEY has done his contemporaries a great service in giviftg the time and considerable labour necessary...

MR. LUSTGARTEN examines six trials for murder in which the verdicts are open to dispute. Three of them, in his opinion, are demonstrably bad. Sir Patrick Hastings reviews a...

4 25 .) A FEw years ago a critic of modern English music said that its strength was that it " had never left the Church Door." A critic of modern poetry may say quite as truly...

ACROSS 1. What the artist must do to finish his limning of the fox, and with this. (5, 5.) 6. Progressive relationship. (4.) 9. Brown was on it in fiction. (10.) 10. Na insult,...

A MIE" _II Ai L pot is A 0 E ull Alli 5 n .ri ..,..lt ,£'I ITIM N r A R III T T P A Nri A OIROCIMNI I ,e 5 C 1 in Al T T 4 R ESA i 9 II ril i ais a E p •1 I IT II _ =0 R T I e....

Men of Stones. By Rex Warner. (Bodley Head. 9s.) "Sprite-like, with a little strained ghost-face beneath a silver shock of hair, it seemed as if her long blue eyes had absorbed...

s.) IT is not very easy, one would think, to write the life of a young dancer, even of a famous young dancer, when she has barely reached the age of twenty-four. It is a help,...

The Drawings of Henry Fuseli. By Paul Ganz. (Max Parrish. au) " A unix white-headed, lion-faced man in an old flannel dressing- gown tied round the waist with a piece of rope...

A History of Russian Literature. By D. S. Mirsky. Edited and Abridged by Francis J. Whitfield. (Routledge. 2 p.) THE two volumes of D. S. Mirsky's History of Russian Literature....

By CUSTOS FOR most investors 1949 will be judged to have been a reasonably satisfactory year. Admittedly, the all-important question of correct timing of buying and selling has...