The President of Venezuela Senor Luis Herrera has a t heory that the IQ of schoolchildren can be increased with the right sort of government intervention. Two years ago he...

Cork, Ireland Climbing at teatime over a drystone wall, by a group of remote farm buildings, I was observed by a tiny, solemn child, who asked me where I was heading. 'If you're...

Andrew Brown Gothenburg Some weeks ago the Gothenburg papers reported that a mysterious red-haired man had visited the local tax offices to release rats from a cardboard box...

Sam White Paris If Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris and official Gaullist candidate, would obligingly twist his tall and wiry frame into a question mark he would, for...

Richard West San Salvador The death and resurrection of Christ can seldom have been remembered with such solemnity and fervour as this year in El Salvador, a country named in...

Nicholas von Hoffman VI'ashington There are in the neighbourhood of 30 million black people in the United States and not one of them is in the Senate. Past and present, there...

Mr Charles Darwin, the great naturalist, has written a letter to Professor Holmgren, of Upsala, on the subject of vivisection, published in The Times of Monday last. In that...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Johannesburg South Africa is the same and isn't the same. On Wednesday next, 29 April, the National Party (NP or Nats) will win the general election, as it...

George Gale The Irish are fond of proclaiming that they alone can understand the Irish problem; but since at the same time they go on to declare its insolubility, their...

Roy Kerridge On Easter morning in Rochdale the bells rang out from the parish church of St Chad on the hilltop, echoing over the neat rows of terraced houses where children...

Visiting fire-ladies Paul Johnson To liven up the end of Lent, London clasped to its cynical bosom two foreign ladies here to turn an honest penny with autobiographical...

The bull market Tony Rudd What was so extraordinary about the stock market just before Easter was not simply that it went into new high ground (something which had been on the...

Sir: The latitude of irrelevance to his designated subject that you have always allowed Richard Ingrams is curious but has sometimes produced readable results. It seems to me,...

Sir: Richard West, for all I know, may be totally correct in his diagnosis of the Brixton riots (18 April) but the form of his argument does not inspire confidence, Peer through...

Sir: In 'Against the disabled' (21 March), Auberon Waugh suggests that to be disabled entitles one to be bitter, and that disabled people in receipt of various cash benefits...

Sir: Surely your reviewer (Hugh Massingberd, 11 April) is mistaken in calling Anna Katharine Green 'the first woman to write detective fiction.' The Leavenworth Case (though I...

Sir: To Paul Johnson's vignettes of Bishops Mandell Creighton and Winnington Ingram (11 April) can perhaps be added one of an earlier Bishop of London, William Blomfield. He...

Sir: Peter Ackroyd writes the best film criticism around and his review of Roman Polanski's Tess (18 April) exceeds, if anything, his usual brilliant standard. However, I am...

Fundamentally careless Alastair Forbes A Lonely Business: A Self Portrait of James Pope - Hennessy Edited by Peter Quennell (Weidenfeld pp. 278, £12.50) 'In the nursery' James...

Anthony Storr Lucy: the Beginnings of Humankind Donald C. Johanson & Maitland A. Edey (Granada pp. 409, £9.95) The Making of Mankind Richard E. Leakey (Michael Joseph pp. 256,...

Alan Gibson A Fourth Innings with Cardus (Souvenir Press pp. 254, £7.50) nom Bradman to Boycott Ted Dexter (Queen Anne Press pp. 159, £7.95) W.G. Grace: His Life and Times Eric...

An unfinished life A .N. Wilson The Hill Station: An Unfinished Novel J.G. Farrell (Weidenfeld pp, 228, £6.50) J.G. Farrell was only 45 when he died so sadly and suddenly,...

Caroline Moorehead A Philip Roth Reader (Cape pp. 484, £8.95) In interviews Philip Roth has complained that the vast success of Portnoy's Complaint branded him as a writer of...

A world of grey John McEwen Alberto Giacometti has been so well served by the Arts Council over the years (three solo shows since 1955 plus a significant corner of the recent...

Pop heroes , Peter Ackroyd Popeye (`U', Odeon, Leicegter Square) Superman ('U', selected cinemas) April is the cruellest month, breeding dead heroes out of old ground. Easter...

Even so . • . Richard In grams Exactly a year after his Benjamin Britten film Tony Palmer provided a second marathon musical biography on Sunday for LWT, this time of Sir...

The twain meet Tau Southampton, Long Island In the winter of 1978 my friend Anthony Haden-Guest went to Italy to research a long article about terrorism. After about a month...

Star bores Jeffrey Bernard I worked like a dog all over Easter trying to find four winners that combined in a yankee would set me up with the beach bar in the West Indies that...