T HE General Council of the Trades Union Congress may fairly consider itself unlucky. It has fallen a victim to that perennial nightmare of editors : its annual report has been...

T HE closing stages of the London conference on Suez find (at the time of writing) the powers divided into two groups. On the one hand there are the Western and Baghdad Pact...

T HE news from Cyprus is encouraging. Several days, perhaps weeks, must pass before it is possible to be sure that EOKA's cease-fire order has actually caused firing —and...

By our German Correspondent Bonn IN East Berlin last Saturday Bert Brecht shared a funeral with the West German Communist Party. It was the Pankow Government's first chance for...

BY DESMOND DONNELLY, MP T HE Suez crisis has proved one fact—there is only just enough sand in Sinai to bury the heads of the political ostriches that abound in Britain. First,...

By CHARLES CURRAN B EHIND the Suez talks, ' you can 'now hear in London the sound of many voices asking questions. The voices belong to politicians. At the moment, they are...

W HATEVER the results of the London conference on Suez, it has represented a distinct advance on most such gatherings in the past. The assembled delegates, whatever their...

IN 1938 the 4th Marquis sold land and property in Cardiff for more than £5 million.—Daily Express. . . around £7 million.—Evening Standard. I • , around £20 million.—Daily Mail,

in 1952, his former wife announced that she would vote Republican. This time Mrs. Stevenson, who before she married was Miss Ellen Borden, is not confining herself to such...

not ghost stories, but books on public relations. The most recent to come my way is by Stanley Kelley Jun. on Professional Public Relations and Political Power, which Mr. S. E....

atmo- sphere of urbanity. There have been no scenes and few curt rejoinders. We are far indeed from the days when Clemenceau could tell the Rumanian Prime Minister to sit down...

THE BBC's incorpe, we are told by the Committee of Public Accounts, is 'considerably in excess of its immediate needs.' This will presumably lead to a demand that a larger slice...

Edmund Wilson protested 'against your capitalisation of the pronouns referring to Jesus in my letter' published in a previous issue. I do not know how far Mr. Wilson follows...

familiar with the advice of Chancellor Oxienstierna of Sweden to the son whom he was sending to the congress that made the Peace of Westphalia : 'Go and see with how little...

has wings. In the middle of these it also has a body; and this is the part with which it thinks. This statement may seem too bold, it may give away too much to the English love...

BY J. W. N. WATKINS EPUDIATED by philosophers, Hegelian ideas have found a more congenial habitat in the minds of art historians, students of international affairs and...

By LI ONEL HALE ' An inquiry into the stature of the mid-twentieth century nausea, in the manner of Mr. Colin Wilson. \ A T first sight, the Backsider is more than a man, and...

of survival or suicide—a choice between fighting and mass unemployment. Like most 'either-or' proposi- tions, this is irrelevant and unrealistic. It is irrelevant because the...

SIR,—I cannot remember when last I dipped into Toni Brown's Schooldays, but, like Mr. Usborne, I first read it on my father's recom- mendation. It did not affect me profoundly;...

as a boy I read it, I was dreadfully bored, but I think Mr. Usborne's article is an example of how an unfair slant can be put upon a book by selective quotation. In referring...

Euston 3221

of Mr. Hugh Ross Williamson con- cerning the Co-Redemption of Mary. His suggestion that only God and Mary can say• to Christ, 'My Son,' and the implication that he plUced on it,...

under it. It is true that Egypt's political behaviour is to a considerable extent motivated by pathological hatreds. But is Egypt the only country where irrational forces...

Suez Sir Geoffrey Mander, Harvey R. Cole, Norman Birnbaum beification and Clarification Evelyn Waugh, Rev. J. W. Kennedy, G. S. C. Hibbert, Rev. J. S. Habgood Torn Brown's...

must conclude that St. Anne has a privilege not even shared by God —namely the ability to say to Christ: 'My Grandson.'—Yours faithfully, J. S. HABGOOD 3 Abingdon Court,...

SIR,—The Spectator was, and I hope still is, the favourite reading of clergymen of the Church of England. Could they not organise a little mission to your contributors and...

Son of God' is not at all the same thing as saying that 'Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of Mary.' Roman Catholics can use the latter phrase as their way of expressing their...

his own reference to the 'envy and malice with which we have for years been attacked.' The envy and malice exist only in his own imagination, and so does the abuse of him that...

THE YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL. By Sally Benson. (Arts.) Tins rather slow-moving little morality of the jazz age owes a great deal of what wry charm it has to the playing by Lois Smith...

Necrology So Brecht is dead. The Berlin of the jazz age seems suddenly more remote, and the only great writer domiciled beyond the Iron Curtain has disappeared. I say 'great'...

he should descend along the knife- like One Man's Pass, circling'down to Bunglas, where from a cliff height of about 300 feet he will enjoy a sea and cliff panorama without...

SIR,—I am indebted to Mr. Derek Hudson for correcting, in your issue of August 17, a faulty answer to one of my 'Holiday Ques- tions.' I can but plead in defence that my...

Peter Quennell's remarks about my translation of Cocteau's Portraits-Souvenir in the Spectator of August 3, surprised that he should have enjoyed the book enough to check the...

I WAS surprised to see last week's letter from the Independent Television Authority urging us to remember what Government spokesmen promised during the TV Bill debates—a corpse,...

STELLA. (Paris-Pullman.)--THE WICKED Go TO HELL. (Cameo-Polytechnic.) — THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE. (Studio One.) le Michael Cacoyannis's Stella is.a fair sample of what Greek...

HAVING last week reviewed the constructivist displays in the 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition at Whitechapel, I turn now to the `dadaist' con- tributions, so called because they...

AUGUST 27, 1831 ST. PAUL'S IN DANGER.—Not unfounded fears have been entertained for the south portion of the Cathedral, in consequence of an enormous drain which has been dug...

`Foie Gras to the Sound of Trumpets . . BY PETER QUENNELL N N entertaining anthology, published some twenty years ago, was devoted to the ultimate, or penultimate, speeches of...

IT is not surprising that each generation seeks its own interpreta- tion of the figure of Charlemagne. Delisle Burns described the shout that greeted Charles's coronation in 800...

DUBLIN'S JOYCE. By Hugh Kenner. (Chatto and Windus, 25s.) As every American schoolboy knows, Finnegans Wake opens in mid-sentence with : 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from...

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO ARCHIEOLOGY. By Professor V. G. Childe. (Muller, 10s. 6d.) EARLY ANATOLIA. By Seton Lloyd. (Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.) 'THE British were, and are,' declares...

IT is just thirty years ago since Piofessor Norman Sykes awakened interest in the episcopate of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with his excellent biography...

not to say . breezy, adventures of sardonically tough Chicago newspaperman who wakes one morning with a hangover and a body in the bed. Enormously fast, embellished with black...

LONG before Davy Crockett got his grip on the young idea this land was threatened by a generation of young Buffalo Bills, readers of fourpenny `books' which were the chief...

rather more machine-made American thriller-cum-detective story is also about books, or rather a book — an Horatio Alger first edition, the chase after which, by a refreshingly...

6d.) It may merely be translation from the French (very good, incidentally, by the talented Delano Ames) that gives a whiff of Simenon to this quite simple tale of Monsieur...

novel that gives new twist to old theme of corpse- in-the-library, for the library is a sort of public library plus, functioning on Mr. Dewey's decimal system of classification....

SHE DIED WITHOUT LIGHT. By Nieves Mathews. (Hodder and Stoughton, lls. 6d.) Poison in the pension: aged Swiss landlady's death by arsenic contrived and explained in a notably...

MY Doo TULIP. By J. R. Ackerley. (Secker and Warburg, 10s. 6d.) MR. ACKERLEY'S Alsatian bitch Tulip is doubtless a delightful dog, but it would be embarrassing to meet her now...

6d.) More sluggings—slugs of rye and slugs of sex, with some fancy shooting and knifing to break the monotony. Routine rough stuff, with the routine soft centre—no less timeworn...

Hamilton, 12s. 6d.) Sinister-seeming Oriental stabbed in sealed room; Mr. Carr is an adept at this kind of puzzle, and can spin it out to book-length in his sleep. Perhaps he did.

6d.) Decent chap blackmailed by bad hat, who gets murdered in New Forest, and fried in forest fire. Luck plays its part in clearing decent chap, but the blackmailer was a loss,...

Two excellent novels this week evoke two complete sets of circumstances and ways of life and thought, and, by almost exactly opposite methods, achieve rather similar results....

Nice old-fashioned detective stuff in Suva, capital of Fiji, with Fijians, Sikhs, a few sweating white men, some in- betweens, and a digger's-eye-view, at least a generation out...

12s. 6d.) A frolic, not to be taken any more seriously by its readers than by its author—the man who, in Fear to Tread, wrote the best British crime story since the war: a...

6d.) The hero is Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable Ivor Dalgleish St. Pelham St. George, VC, DSO, and the old soldier servant stiffens to attention when he speaks, even in...

Davies, 12s. 6d.) is a belated but interesting addition to the escapers' book club. The author, an American, came down by parachute over the Ile d'Oleron, off the west coast of...

BY IAN NIALL THE year of the short corn my grandfather talked about was one when winter stayed late and summer was too brief. I remember making the old man frown by suggesting...

'Touring the West of Ireland recently,' says a reader who lives in Bucks, 'I looked up the lovely mountain of Croagh Patrick in Co. Mayo, 2,000 ft. of rough stony path up which...

of the budgerigars dying of suffocation, had opened his cages and broken his windows to let them escape. I hoped he would be able to recapture some of the survivors, for...

Spring or autumn for grass sowing? asks a reader. The advantage of sowing at the tail end of summer is that birds are not quite so short of sources of food as they are in the...

BY NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IT is worth recording that at no time during the Suez crisis did the Stock Exchange behave as if a war were likely to break out. There was not the...

BY PHI LIDOR No. 64. P. TEU CATE BLACK (6 men) WHITE (8 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's problem by Shinkman: Q-Q Kt I...

BY CUSTOS THE revival in the gilt-edged market, which has been the outstanding feature of the Stock Exchange, was overdue. The war scare had died away, the Cyprus news was...

ACROSS Reimprison? Let's think it over (10). 6 A sort of fragmentary mixture (4). 1 0 The dark river (5). 1 1 'In - are triumph and defeat' (Longfellow) (9). 1 2 It's a...

with a distinctive 1956 flavour. WE live, of course, in a perpetual Silly Season-at least so far as certain portions Of the press are concerned. But what I was looking for was...

4 prize of six guineas is o f fered for a translation into English verse of the poem 'Sands : Herbst' by Annette von Droste H filshoft : Wenn ich an einem schonen Tag Der...