TV Times T he 49th Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern I reland was dissolved. The general election campaign got under way with the publica- tion of...

ALLIANCE: WIN BY LOSING A . 11 who wish the Alliance success in this election should hope that the Tories will win an overall majority. An overall majority for the Alliance is...

how Cambridge will vote Predict the result competition. Doris Heffer's election day.

The simplicity of not getting more than you bargained for FE RDINAND MOUNT W ho's got the big Mo? That, we are told, is always the question in American elections. Momentum is...

ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR T h Washington e portrait of himself which Ronald Reagan at first so cheerfully accepted, that of a befuddled old President fiddling while Nicaragua burned,...

A terrible dilemma for the Church of England at the present moment in time AUBERON WAUGH I t was sad and slightly shocking to see the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd John...

WHAT TIME HAS COME? Michael Trend on unsettled Alliance plans for becoming the official opposition some, power The national organisation of the Liberals and the SDP —...

MAGGIE'S YOBBOES Richard West visits Nottinghamshire, where working-class Toryism has taken hold Mansfield FUTURE historians of the Margaret Thatcher governments may well...

GERRY ADAMS FOR PARLIAMENT Stephen Robinson on why people in West Belfast may still vote for Sinn Fein Belfast THERE is an absolute peach of a photo- opportunity in the Falls...

THE BEASTLIEST IN THE REALM A. L. Rowse shows how the North-South divide has existed through English history WE SHALL hear so much in this election about the division in...

WHY I SHALL VOTE LABOUR Mr Kinnock's personality is the only one he can trust I WAS recently served in Collets bookshop by a young man sporting a badge with the legend 'Glad...

Sam White questions how much France has to fear from the revelations of Klaus Barbie Paris `FRANCE'S shame' was the headline the Guardian newspaper chose to put on its report...

Adrian Smith witnessed the military takeover and found it characteristic of the island Suva SUVA lies on the wet side of Fiji. It is a strong contender for the most rainy...

Edward Mortimer argues that `world order' has been forgotten by politicians who never knew the war LET pundits say what they like. I am sticking to my private conspiracy...

THE 'pit-brow women' of Lancashire, whose right to earn their wages of 2s. a day has been threatened with legislative interference for the last two years, interviewed the Home...

This article, from 1955, first brought to whose memorial service was last week BY the time I was in hospital there was no doubt what had happened, and it was already hard for...

Sir: I am writing to express my objection to a passage in Richard West's article 'Time To Free Mandela' (2 May). Whatever the merits of his argument, I doubt that the sentence,...

Sir: Michael Trend's examination of the assumptions behind the new way of teaching history (Past caring', 4 April) was enlightening and disturbing. To encourage the young to...

Sir: It was a pity that Mr Welch only met the late Dwight Macdonald once, on 'a grisly occasion' when 'he repeatedly and loudly laughed off Auschwitz,' as de- scribed in Mr...

Sir: It might help to solve the Hollis riddle if the contradiction over the interrogation of the Russian defector, Igor Gouzenko, could be resolved. What has Richard Deacon or...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY - Save 15% on the Cover Price! Please enter a subscription to The Spectator I enclose my cheque for £ (Equivalent SUS & Eurocheques accepted) RATES 12 Months...

PHILIP CHAPPELL Why does ownership matter? To those who believe that you have to give govern- ments and institutions only half a chance for them to get it wrong, it seems...

What went wrong for the man of modest means RICHARD NORTHEDGE apes that the small investor would gain from the Big Bang began, and ended, opposite the tube station in the...

What the boys in the backroom cost the citizen capitalist ROBERT APFEL finance is very much like the trucking business. When you strip away the pin- striped suits,...

How to be taken for a ride in a taxi-driver's market CHRISTOPHER FILDES W e are in a taxi-driver's market. Shares have gone soaring upwards, like untethered balloons, with the...

THE form-book suggests that election markets should be treated with care. The City can guess wrong. It misguessed in 1970, and again in the first of the 1974 elections. More...

Mr Leigh-Pemberton's embarrassment of riches JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE I recall this incident because Governor Leigh-Pemberton's annual Mais Lecture to the London Business School the...

THE London paper mountain is height- ened this week by hundreds of thousands of new share certificates, each representing a toe-hold on Rolls-Royce. Many will have been sold as...

THE resurgence of the private investor could herald direct personal ownership of the nation's means of creating wealth, with all that could follow from that, economical- ly and...

DARLING DIANA THE autobiography of Diana Cooper, one of the century's great originals and beauties, is dominated by passages from an extensive correspondence with her admirer...

Different from us? Brian Masters TYCOON: THE LIFE OF JAMES GOLDSMITH by Geoffrey Wansell Grafton, f12.95 FORTE by Charles Forte Sidgwick & Jackson, f12.95 CLORE: THE MAN...

Francis King MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively Deutsch, £9.95 F or those who may be misled by the title of Penelope Lively's new novel into think- ing that a night-time safari...

Harriet Waugh TALKING TO STRANGERS by Ruth Rendell Hutchinson, £10 s Ruth Rendell killing the appetite of her readers with her creative largesse? Last year she produced two...

Anita Brookner THE LAST ROMANTICS by Caroline Seebohm Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f10.95 0 ne of the curious facts about women is that, to judge from the recent spate of novels on...

Andrei Navrozov THE RUSSIAN ALBUM by Michael Ignatieff Chatto &Windus, f12.95 A mongst the priority items on the new agenda of Gorbachev's propagandists is the aim of...

Michael Levey THE LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE, VOL. IV: 1921-1924 edited by W. Roberts, J. T. Boulton and E. Mansfield CUP, ,£35 D . H. Lawrence is one of the greatest...

J. L. Carr THE COMPLETE NOTEBOOKS OF HENRY JAMES edited by Leon Edel and Lyall Powers Oxford, £22.50 T his is a last gleaning of Henry James's writing. There are 250 pages of...

Robert Cushman THE COMPLETE LYRICS OF LORENZ HART edited by Robert Kimball and Dorothy Hart Hamish Hamilton, £25 hen the word 'poet' is applied to a songwriter there are...

`You mustn't despair', she wrote. 'Despair is sin.' And so it is, but from what origin? From what first history thinking can't recall (Being pedantic, crude, mechanical) Does...

Sculpture Outward bound John Thackara climbs above the treetops to survey a bold attempt to take art out of the gallery and into the world D eep in Believer Forest on...

Switching to flora Ursula Edwards T here are two aspects to making a garden, on that we are all agreed. One is the cultivation of plants, the other their disposition. Opinions...

The cant of compromise Selby Whittingham argues for a rationalisation of London's great public art collections W hen a dozen years ago I first campaigned for the reunification...

Prick Up Your Ears ('18', Curzon West End) Outrage- Hilary Mantel h ere was an epoch — as remote now as the Naughty Nineties or the Roaring Twenties — when cheap rooms were...

The Hairy Ape (National Theatre) Richard H (Barbican) Triumphant oik Christopher Edwards I f the arrival of this transfer from Strat- ford had occurred a little earlier,...

Children and dogs Wendy Cope M y footballing friend threatened nev- er to speak to me again if I didn't watch the Cup Final and write about Tottenham's inevitable triumph....

Splitting on the spouse Taki hear that Peter Holm, the Swedish ham who was once married to Joan Collins, is getting £250,000 for spilling the beans about the Dynasty star,...

Driven to drink Jeffrey Bernard I just heard a terrific bang and smash followed by screams, and ran out into the street to find that someone had driven a car right into the...

Sugar and sex Alice Thomas Ellis My two favourites concern sugar and sex. A wonderfully didactic Victorian physician was much moved by the beauty, the clear skins and bright...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers Dictionary, value £13.95 — ring the words 'Chambers Dictionary' above) for the first...

Casus belli Raymond Keene G ary Kasparov, not only world chess champion but also president of the Grand- master Association, has achieved every- thing he wants from the...

Dizzy spells Jaspistos I N Competition No. 1472 you were asked for an extract from a pupil's essay full of amusing mis-spellings. I was looking for plausible mis-spellings,...

I WAS poisoned last week. We went to dinner with the Stantons on Friday and they poisoned me: spectacular but short- lived diarrhoea and vomiting followed. The best thing about...

ErbOALESC E A S I E 1! / S CHAN 4 TY L I AN O N IC ▪ 1111 E NT° E N1N 'tont) F R A G 4 1 4 s. E EN Replacements for 0 in jumbles: (Ac) 6m 15d 16q 22v 30e 31r 36k 38n...

Columnists frequently offer ingenious, loony and horrible suggestions as to how to brighten up interior decoration. You are invited to offer bad-taste advice on 'impro- ving'...

Vinitaly 1987 LAST year's Vinitaly (the big Italian wine fair held in Verona) was, they told me, more like a funeral than a fair. The methanol scandal broke just before it...