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56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 071-405 1706; Telex: 27124; Fax: 071-242 0603 WHO'S GRATEFUL NOW? am overwhelmed with gratitude to my parliamentary colleagues'...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY — Save 18% on the Cover Price! RATES 12 Months 6 Months UK 0 £66.00 0 £33.00 Europe (airmail) 0 £77.00 0 £38.50 USA Airspeed 0 US $99 0 $49.50 Rest of...

T he late Master of Emmanuel College, Edward Welbourne, used to maintain that the Jews and the Celts were responsible for most of the ills of this land. How much better off we...

The straight and narrow way or the primrose path for the Tory party CHARLES MOORE A s the editor of this journal could tell you better than I, when you interview Politicians...

by MPs who trust opinion polls, but cannot be trusted to take part in one themselves THE uselessness of Tory MPs has to be experienced to be believed. When the philosopher...

James Bowman on the increasing opposition in America to war in the Gulf Washington 'IT'S all starting again!' These are the words which, as division becomes more and more...

Alan Booth on the underclass that the Japanese prefer to ignore THE Japanese Establishment's habit of hushing up the potentially embarrassing has been dented, albeit slightly,...

Michael Heath

Radek Sikorski is backing the radical candidate in Sunday's presidential elections Warsaw MY FAVOURITE candidate for the pres- idency of Poland is Zbigniew Brzezinski and I...

Sandra Barwick sings along at the launch of the Movement for Christian Democracy 'WHO can sound the depths of sorrow?' Who indeed? No more fitting a hymn for a time of...

THE last ten days have been marked by an excitement in the City which has twice almost reached the proportions of a great panic. It has been for some time whispered about that...

A profile of Bernard Ingham, the Yorkshireman always at Mrs Thatcher's side MRS Thatcher had no cabinet colleagues alongside her on Tuesday when she announced that she would...

sp Ec TH woR How to save yourself 51 trips to the library . . . or over £30 on The Spectator If you're forced to share The Spectator with fellow students, then you'll know...

The press: Paul Johnson is unhappy at the way things are going on the Independent ONE casualty of the Tory leadership crisis has been the reputation of the Indepen- dent. I...

Conservative freedom doesn't work? Oh, well, let's try Conservative planning CHRISTOPHER FILDES T he Conservatives in their third term of office were flagging and feuding, the...

I WAS delighted to see City and Suburban selections — Rona Lady Delves Broughton and Peter Nutting — finishing first and second in the Lloyd's of London Stakes. The Council...

SUDDENLY the skies are thick with chairmen shot down from their jobs on golden parachutes. Manning the ack-ack guns are the institutional shareholders, led by the insurance...

VIVE le bouquet d'ail qui coule a travers le tunnel sous-marin, direction Sangatte Douvres, et vive l'issue des droits d'Euro- tunnel — mais il ne semble pas plus facile en...

KNOCK, knock! — Who's there? Halpern! — Halpem who? Halpernyourselftotwomillioneasesthepain ofparting.

Sir: At the end of his article (No rules for killing people', 10 November) Charles Glass states that General Schwarzkopf's forces in the Gulf possess 'the largest amount of...

Karl Heinz Lohs of Leipzig's Toxicological Institute and says he worked on East Germany's chemic- al warfare programme. This is not the case. Although Professor Lohs was one of...

Sir: Having myself suffered an attack of gout earlier this year, I deeply sympathise with my friend Alan Watkins (Diary, 1 7 November) in having to add this painful condition to...

Sir: Simon Courtauld asserts ('Old money rivals new', 20 October) that 'farmland has fallen fourfold in value over the last decade'. This is nonsense: farm incomes have fallen...

of sufferers battle on against a cruel disease and an ignorant medical profession. Just as MS sufferers were sidelined as hysterics until sophisticated tests came along, so now...

Sir: A lot of funny things go on in the world of ME, its diagnosis and treatment, but I wish that Dr Dalrymple had approached the subject (If symptoms persist, 10 November) from...

died, of the vicar of her parish church (Ludham, Norfolk) to use the funeral service from the Book of Common Prayer, although he did finally agree to speak those poignant words...

what came over them. They ascribe their absence of mind variously to drink, drugs, their childhood, stress and the menopause. The problem for those of us who believe in plain...

Sir: Your correspondent Peter Mullen's sad experience in a hospital chapel (`Their own funeral', 10 November), is not abso- lutely typical of the Church of England at this time....

Sir: What Antony Lambton surely very optimistically called his 'amusing' retalia- tory contribution to your Letters (17 November) was alas as short of facts as it was of humour,...

Books of the Year A selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors Francis King Best and worst biographies...

A good year for political biography. I missed John Grigg's The Young Lloyd George when it first came out in 1973. It has now been reissued in paperback (Methuen, £12.99) and...

There are books one respects, books one admires and books one simply enjoys, without activating the steamy critical apparatus. Yours, Plum: The Letters of P.C. Wodehouse...

Most of my reading this year has, of course, been in Victor Silvester's Modern Dancers' Handbook, but I have also en- joyed Justin Cartwright's Look At It This Way (Macmillan,...

Before the Storm by Theodore Fontane, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (OUP, £6.95). The World's Classics did it again: published a fine big book at a realistic price. This is...

Richard Mullen's Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World (Duckworth, £25) is the model of a literary biography — sensible, balanced, readable and based on years of...

I greatly admired and enjoyed A.S. Byatt's Possession (Chatto, £13.95) which de- serves its nomination as novel of the year. It is good to see a woman novelist de- ploying such...

Frances Partridge's latest collection of diaries, Hanging On: 1960-1963 (Collins, £15) is, as ever, beautifully written and observed. Neither sparing nor pitying her- self, her...

Like everyone who prefers books to the bovine box, my worst nightmare is to be caught inside an airplane without the writ- ten word. When it happened to me recent- ly, I asked...

One of the advantages of reviewing is that you get to read books which otherwise you might never buy and never digest. I greatly profited from An Empire of Their Own by Neal...

The two books I remember most are in the sharpest contrast, the first being fiction written with such authority and skill that I found it hard to believe it was not history. In...

I Have Sind: Charles Napier in India by Priscilla Napier (Michael Russell, £16.95). Ever since hearing the peccavi pun, most of us have felt drawn to this extraordinary man;...

Life with a Star by Jiri Weil (Collins, £12.95). This pitiless account of a Prague Jew's life under the Nazis chills the read- er's heart. It is not that the horrors are laid...

A late and luscious windfall, The Sub- Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue (£18.99), has just been published to mark the 90th birthday of Hubert Butler, Kil- kenny squireen,...

To mock wittily is fairly easy, but to be wittily serious, allowing the seriousness to show under the gloss of the wit, is more difficult, and is delightful in Hilary Man- tel's...

Books of journalism rather than new fiction dominated my better reading this year. So much good journalism probably left little time for modern fiction. The collected works of...

As it happens, two of the books I most enjoyed this year are about India: Hilary Spurling's Paul Scott: A Life (Hutchinson, £18.99) and V. S. Naipaul's India: A Million...

I have mostly been re-reading old favourites like Homer and Catullus, and, for work, flopping about lethargically in memoirs of Tennyson's friends. But I enormously enjoyed...

I don't recall a year in which I have been sent so many bad books to review. One I did enjoy in 1990, but had no opportunitY to notice, was Clive Aslet's The American Country...

J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron (Secker, £12.95) was very impressive. It convinced me that this is what dying will be like. So it's made a difference to my life. The only other...

Moscow! by Christopher Hope (Heinemann, £14.95), a poignant, funny and wonderfully written account of the state of the Russian soul; William Palmer's The Good Republic (Secker,...

Boswell the Great Biographer edited by M.K. Danziger and Frank Brady (Heine- mann, £25) brought to an end (at long last) the series of 13 volumes of Boswell's complete diaries....

Attempting to survey the year's books with an impartial eye is a depressing task. So many of them, yet so few that are memor- able from a distance, possibly because of a lack of...

If ever there was a time for two books on the heart of the USSR and Central Europe, it is now. Susan Richards's re- markable Epics of Everyday Life (Viking, £15.99) is an...

New novels can be like love affairs. If it happens one can hardly say why, and the most apparently eligible may make no impression. All the Booker shortlist left me cold in...

Anita Brookner JANET FRAME: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Women's Press, £20, pp. 436 T his superb autobiography, heralded on the jacket by Michael Holroyd, is really three volumes...

Alan Clark THE SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE RICH by Philip Beresford Weidenfeld, £18.95, pp. 336 S ome Sundays ago, crouched against the Aga, being barged into by wet-coated and...

Once only, whitely, skimming the grinding sea. That it was he whom I should love the most, That is the dream which now obsesses me. Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) Translated from...

are wet' Tend to be tearful. Not so mine. I do not regret Soaking my sleeves as I picked these flowers For a person lovelier yet.

Just as the moon emerged from cloud It happened that I thought of her, And foolish tears reduced that proud Sharp brilliance to a blur. Priest Saigyo (1118-1190)

When I was young they told me It was my lack of years Which made her death so piercingly bitter. What cause for tears Can they offer now, for the self-same grief, To the grey...

Richard West PATRIOTS by Sousa Jamba Viking, £13.99, pp. 292 S ince winning The Spectator's Shiva Naipaul Prize for travel writing in 1987, the Young Angolan, Sousa Jamba,...

Mary Keen M e and My Garden books are the horticultural equivalent of the autobiog- raphical first novel. The best of this tradi- tion gives us E. A. Bowles, Vita Sackville-...

Joseph Hone THE SOCCER WAR by Ryszard KapuScinski Granta Books, £12.99, pp. 234 I have often been sick in Africa. . . If you want to enter the most sombre, treacherous and...

Ross Clark THE SPECTATOR ANNUAL edited by Fiona Glass Grafton, £14.99, pp. 242 THE BEDSIDE GUARDIAN edited by Nicholas de Jongh Fourth Estate, £12.99, pp. 328 T he...

Give me the broad, the languid rivers, the movements you do not see but sense, the drinking willows, the aimless dykes, a dead-still town along the shore. Give me the winter,...

J. Enoch Powell EUROPE OF MANY CIRCLES: CONSTRUCTING A WIDER EUROPE by Richard Body New European Publications, 04.95, pp. 182 ir Richard Body MP is a doughty fellow, a figure...

Andro Linklater THE SORROW OF BELGIUM by Hugo Claus Viking, £14.99, pp. 603 D uring the first world war my father served as a private soldier on the Western Front, an...

"On mornings with no money but The summer" 's how I see you, Paul, Holy liar lighting up The true behind the factual: An obsessed, imaginative Compassion seeking out the real...

Architecture The other Robert Adam Gavin Stamp Classical Design in the Late 20th Century: The Recent Work of Robert Adam (RIBA Heinz Gallery, till 20 December) 0 ne of the...

Flatliners ('15', selected cinemas) Dicing with death Hilary Mantel A s soon as the credit sequence begins you know this film aspires to be something higher than horror; but...

Complex Oedipus Robin Holloway N ow that the English National Opera has staged Busoni's Doktor Faust and Opera North Dukas's Ariane et Barbe- Bleue, there remain three...

Miss Julie (Greenwich) Rough Crossing (King's Head) Playing with fire Christopher Edwards I n 1888 Strindberg sent Miss Julie to his publisher with the ringing words: 'I take...

Birmingham Royal Ballet (Birmingham Hippodrome) Good move Deirdre McMahon D uring the past ten years the French government has pursued an active policy of 'implantation' with...

The new gloom Alistair McAlpine n the early Sixties, when the great boom in works of art had just begun, I remember going to the opening of a new gallery. A guest pointed out...

Keith Vaughan (Agnew's, till 14 December) Gillian Ayres (Fischer Fine Art, till 14 December) Cat and nous Giles Auty S ometimes I feel the role of the critic in relation to...

Knavish tricks Martyn Harris ell before the leadership ballot on W Tuesday I had grown weary of the sight of Mr Michael Heseltine stalking about his garden in beige pullie and...

Follow my leader Taki I t has been a disastrous week. First of all the Heseltines of this world ignore John Public and attempt to oust a sitting Prime Minister, one they...

Fall guy Jeffrey Bernard T he last of the autumn leaves have now fallen in the garden beneath my bedroom window and I too have fallen for the third time this year. Last Monday...

The Irish connection Zenga Longmore A s I tried in vain to send Ornalara off tu sleep at the unearthly hour of three in he morning, I was reminded of a song I neard a Welsh...

A veritable treasure house Auberon Waugh T he last offer of the year traditionally goes to Berry Bros, but this year it seems to have gone to El Vino's. It is a sad irony of...

Spectator Wine Club, c/o El Vino Co Ltd. 1 Hare Place, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 1BJ. Telephone: 071-353 5384; Fax: 071-936 2367 Price No. Value White Macon Villages 1989....

Prelude Raymond Keene he world championship, which has transferred from New York after the first twelve games, resumes on Saturday 24 November in Lyon, with Karpov taking...

COMPETITION citIVAS REG: - , 10 12 YEAR OLD -- g/ SCOTCH WHISKY The Gulf man Jaspistos 12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY I n Competition No. 1652 you were asked for a sonnet...

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A first prize of 120 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers English Dictionary — ring the word ' Dictionary') for the first three correct...

D. Fl. Lawrence's Pansies was a collection of free-verse pieces in which he often fretted or raged against aspects of the world around him. What would he be on about today? Your...

Sporty not her forte Frank Keating I FOUND myself uneasily having to small- talk Mr Heseltine earlier this year. He was on the stump in Frome and I mentioned that Somerset's...