AST week, the Defence and Foreign Ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation formally accepted the assumption, already firmly established, that planning for defence...

No. 6600 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1954 PRICE id,

The determined attempt to interfere with the passage into law of the Boundary Commission's report met its end in the Court of Appeal on Monday. The injunction granted in the...

iN a constituency in the. Highlands of Scotland with a tradition as favourable to them as any north of Anglesey, the Liberals to have been fighting a by-election. From the...

To outward appearances the British European Airways crisis was expeditiously settled over the weekend. The engineers who had been summarily dismisssed crept back to work on...

The dubious manoeuvres leading up to the resignation of the Yoshida Government now appear as an instance of the control exercised over Japanese politics by reactionary groups...

The NUR executive has been forced into a strike threat not --as it claims—because it has exhausted all the forms of negotiation, but because it has exhausted the patience of its...

F OR sOine s years the great Christian festivals have been occasions for public meditation in this country on the extent to which we are still a Christian community. If It is to...

for crossing the Atlantic at a profit. You book a fir; class passage on one of the more expensive liners; you buy, on night when the bidding is high, the low field in the sweep...

I quote from the notebook of a Martian anthropologist who, an interplanetary contretemps having obliterated all traces of the human race except the Christmas cards in our...

HE Russians, whose object is to avert the ratification of the Paris agreements. on German rearmament, have followed up their threat to denounce the Franco-Soviet Treaty of 1945...

Less florid than the reproduction of a convivial oil-painti which your wine-meirchant sent you, less tasteful than t,, 11 , woodcut which you received from your book-seller,...

I never niinded much about the Principa l Boy being a lady dressed up as a man, though it struck me, as rather silly and 1 resented the inordinate amount of time which she and...

Spectator has an American namesake. It started life in Chicago in 1879 as Judy's, changed its name to Will Judy's Quarterly Spectator in 1950, and became the Spectator,...

by RICHARD H. ROVERE New York S s all the world knows, the Eisenhower administration is divided on several large questions of foreign policy. On the one hand, there is the...

By GERARD FAY I F I were to attempt my own memoirs of the Abbey they would not fill much space and would certainly not be adequate to mark the jubilee of Dublin's small but...

couple of . weeks beford Christmas in Dellow Road. You will have passed Dellow Road, if you've ever driven via Maidstone to Dover, for Calais. But on this pre-Christmas...

It is indeed about time that the War Damage Commission Was allowed by its employers, if it has any employers, to be ?tore generous in its grants to buildings whose aesthetic...

HE War Damage Commission has never been noted for generosity. Indeed, were it generous all sorts of crooks would be taking advantage of it. But over the restoration of the...

The inhabitants of Oxford have protested against the new o ne-way traffic system in the centre of the city. They say that it has not made the congestion any less. The...

Now is the time when those delightful local almanacks and annuals written in dialect appear on some of the railway bookstalls and in the humble tobacconist and newsagent shops...

Three prizes of eight guineas each arc offered to boys and girls at school in the United Kingdom or Eire for (a) a story of not more than 1.500 words, (h) an essay of not more...

It faded on the crowing of the cock, Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And...

children of the New Areas, but perhaps things will turn out better than she fears, In the long run the children's insipidity may prove to have been of less importance than the...

finds them boringly co-operative, lacking in freshness of vision, and inexperienced in mental pain; and for this last, strange reason, unlovable. These are children under...

having to exercise voluntary brain power. Religion, thought, self-reliance, the prin- ciples and practice of the art of living and the heritage of a culture have been ousted by...

also—of that national mania for 'character training' which has made our spiritual life as ugly, cramped and sordid es modern industrialism has made our cities. Social security...

Sta,---The audience-response to Miss Kendon's timely, if unpalatable, article and that to the recent television production of Geor g e Orwell's 1984 contain certain salient...

SIR,—I should like to express my warm appreciation of Mr.- John Wain's interesting and generous review of my book, Flight of the Skylark. May I be allowed to point out one...

critics who ought to be newsboys. Mr. Gilbert Harding is no doubt a joy to millions. So is ' Mrs. Dale's Diary' and ' The Grove Family,' and I would be the last to suggest that...

SIR,—Mr. Kingsley Amis's sympathetic article rightly stresses the spastic's need for early diagnosis, treatment and special education during the first years of life. But the...

the article by Sir Carleton Allen on Mrs. Woollett in your issue of December 10. The dangers of the kind of legislation which is now on the statute books and which in many ways...

Sts,—Writing in the Spectator of December 3 upon old buildings about_ to be destroyed, Mr. John Betjeman mentions Holyrood House, Spalding, and asks, ' Ought not [the Spalding...

fan flutters; in punt and cafe, at the racecourse and the milliner's, time lazes by; through the Bois and up the Imola boulevards go the gigs at a clip; in the studios the cold...

Arch.) Drum Beat. (Warner.) AT Christmas it is sometimes the good fortune of parents to be able to take their children to films which they themselves can enjoy. Not that their...

TELEVISION and RADIO GLANCE at the Third Programme column of the Radio Times any week, and your eye will almost certainly be caught by the announcement of a talk on some...

Fishermen, as everyone knows, are prone to a little arm-stretching, and if they talk more of the big fish they have almost caught it is perhaps because the , water tends to...

As I was going along the road yesterday I met a party of men and youths who had been off gathering holly. They had found some fine bushes somewhere, but how far they had...

Spider's Web. By Agatha Christie. (Savoy.) Aficionados of the detective story will have difficulty in recognising several of its Most typical ingredients in Agatha Christie's...

Many nursery rhymes are based on his- torical incidents—'Goosey Goosey Gander' was Bishop Gardiner and the 'old man who wouldn't say his prayers' was Archbishop Cranmer. A prize...

it is a fault not to think about the season past. A tree that has had a light crop should, as a rule, be lightly pruned, for a punishin8 with the secateurs encourages the growth...

A reader who used to live in South Wales remarks that he has recently been watching buzzards in Northern Ireland and wonders if they are returning to South Wales too. The...

The usual prize of £5 was offered for a charm against the pains of indigestion after Christmas 'Winner, in not more than eight lines of English verse: the charm to be pronounced...

Siegfried, Wallace, Mason-Dixon, Curzon, Durand, Highland. b. Oxford University, Royal Engineers, Portsmouth. c. Hops. Reformation, Bays, and Beer. d. Jellyfish, crayfish,...

the duties of administration, they were frightened because they were called upon for the first time to perform the 'unctions of government. Like all weak men, they had recourse...

How do we escape our past? To be hailed in your twenties as a coming poet need not necessarily be a kiss of death, but I suppose critics ought to remember that it is not really...

C. Black. 25s.) THIS is the English edition of a book published in America five years ago, and already well known and highly thought of in this country. It is indeed an...

Heinrich Heine. By Barker Fairley. (The Clarendon Press. 15s.) GIVEN sixty pages in which to make a case for a foreign author imperfectly known in Britain, Mr. Lavrin has the...

A Pinch of Pound Notes. The Autobiography of John Dingle. (Hart- Davis. 15s.) The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. (Michael Joseph. 21s.) SINGLENESS of purpose is a terrifying as well...

The Humor of Humor. By Evan Esar. (Phoenix I 2s. 6d.) A skEreit by Lord Kinross, read in isolation in Punch, is always funny, sometimes wildly so, but because of its brevity,...

10 Girton!. 11 Turmoil. 12 Mead. it Unreliable. 16 Sachet. 17 Bear off. 20 Caravan. 21 Adhere. 24 Restaurant. 25 Asti. 27 Long-pkg. 29 Impeach. 30 Stetsons. 31 Endear. DOWN: 1...

2 3 4 5 9 7 8 10 1 I II 4, a 15 19 IS 27 ill 1 20 _ I I 1 26 I 21 16 17 111 25 I ill 14 1 I 13 ■ ?a II ill Two prizes W. awarded each week...

By CUSTOS THERE has been no lack of interest in the Stock Markets in spite of the Christmas shopping. Monday saw the start of dealings in BRITISH PETROLEUM—in other words,...

' By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THERE is always a sigh of relief in Throg- Morton Street when Parliament adjourns— a particularly deep one when a Labour Government is in office. Yet the...