he Chancellor of the Exchequer's Au- tumn Statement predicted a 5.75 per cent rate of inflation by September next year and a growth rate in the economy of 1.25 per cent. Mr...

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone 01-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 242 0603 NOT A HAPPY LOT Y et another is added to the swelling catalogue of those...

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0 brave new world, that has such pictures in it NOEL MALCOLM W hen I asked one of this country's most distinguished political commentators whether he approved of the...

QUENTIN CREWE n Saturday mornings, I go to Apt market. In one of the side streets Jean-Luc Danneyrolles, an enthusiastic, youngish man with sharp-cut features, has a small...

Parliamentarian of the year the winners T he sixth annual presentation of the Spectator/Highland Park Parliamentarian of the Year Awards took place on Wednes- day 22 November....

Britain is doing little to save Hong Kong from Chinese tyranny. Charles Moore reports from a colony living in fear LAST WEEK I visited the Sham Shui Po Vietnamese refugee...

KEEPING A WATCH Ian Buruma examines a preference for conspicuously expensive jewellery IT WAS the most ostentatious watch I had ever seen, as garish as Elton John's stage...

THE ILLUSION OF INFLUENCE The British have been outwitted in the financial market they once dominated, argues Mihir Bose JUST before Prince Charles visited Hong Kong he...

Timothy Garton Ash witnesses crowds in East Germany already demanding reunification Leipzig YOU see it in every face: the grin of sheer incredulity. You feel it in your own...

Stephen Handelman on the threatS to Soviet stability after next week's summit Moscow WHEN President Mikhail Gorbachev steps aboard the guided missile cruiser Slava, jewel of...

Thirties Society Ball and test-drives the dance band of the Nineties THE Porchester Hall, Queensway (built in 1925-7 by the not very well-known H. Sheppard) looks like a rather...

Michael Heath

Marcel Berlins investigates the standard of advocacy among English barristers TIE wasn't much good, the one I had at my trial. The jury found me guilty,' said the friendly...

Charles Glass remembers the journalist who died last week JOURNALISTS have nothing much to give one another, save the few words we write for one of our number who precedes us...

REFERRING to the growth of trade and the return of prosperity, the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer predicted a probable surplus, and also, — what he even regretted, — a rise...

The press: Paul Johnson on why competition sells more newspapers IF NEW newspaper titles are created, do they simply give readers more choice or do they also significantly...

WE NEED the private shareholder — but what about the private bondholder? Why not tap his savings, too? The building societies know how, with their neatly packaged offers and...

TAX changes, though needed, can only go part of the way towards a Budget for savings. To channel savings into com- panies, we need structural changes too. Some are simple. Any...

ONE reform Mr Major should institute at once. His brilliant but perverse predeces- sor insisted on staging his Budget in Cheltenham week, as a rival attraction to the Champion...

THE Chancellor's prompters, in the wings at the Treasury, scratch their heads. Can they take him through the old scripts again? Another speech in praise of high interest rates...

Looking for the saving grace in John Major's Budget CHRISTOPHER FILDES J ohn Major, with his autumn statement off his chest, starts to plan his first Budget amid expectations...

Sir: To judge from press reports, we are confronted with an epidemic of people `shooting themselves in the foot'. Even Paul Johnson had the Labour Party doing it after the...

Sir: May I refer to the review of the book The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power, by R. I. Rothberg and M. F. Shore, (5 August), and more particularly to the...

Sir: It is now five months since the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in China. Since then, you have published some elo- quent and well-reasoned editorials urging the...

Sir: So far only The Spectator (Diary, 7 October) and the Evening Standard have had the integrity to print what Tass, the Soviet News Agency, reported on 21 September: that the...

COMPETITIVENESS. A political ideology maintaining that the world is a hostile, merciless environment, where there must be winners and losers, and where the fittest shall survive...

Sir: No doubt your 'Kissing and Telling' piece and that of Mr Waugh (14 and 21 October) have produced numbers of romantic reminiscences. May I add mine? Long ago I was in a...

Sir: It is hard to believe that David Willetts read Losing Out before writing his review (Books, 18 November). The book does deal with the question of welfare de- pendency. The...

Books of the Year A selection of the best and most overrated books of the year, chosen by some of the Spectator's regular reviewers Hugh Trevor-Roper HOW agreeable, when so...

BERLIOZ has always headed the brief list of my favourite Frenchmen, and his boisterous autobiography is something I return to constantly. Reckless, headlong romantic,...

AFTER reviewing Alvaro Pombo's The Resemblance (Chatto & Windus, £12.95), an ingenious exercise in the traditional Spanish literary device of banging on about the shortcomings,...

THERE is no contest. The noblest book of the year was Primo Levi's Other People's Trades (Michael Joseph, £12.95) which conferred a genuine feeling of renewal and refreshment....

I MUST declare an interest, because Antony Lambton is my friend and Tuscan neighbour, but his book on Lord . Mount- batten (Constable, £12.95) gave me enor- mous pleasure. It...

SIMON Schama's Citizens (Viking, £20) has - been the ante-post favourite since early on in the betting, but I cannot forbear a side bet on The Last Forest (Dent, £16.95) by...

THE two books which interested me most are The Time of My Life by Denis Healey (Michael' Joseph, £17.95) and Inside Out by Rosie Johnston (Michael Joseph, £12.95). The first...

RICHARD Holmes' Coleridge, Early Vi- sions (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.95) strikes exactly the right note of amused, poetic and occasionally exasperated enthu- siasm for its...

ON account of my want of specialist knowledge of the period, I extracted from Richard 011ard's Clarendon and His Friends (Hamish Hamilton, £15) rather the satisfaction of a...

ANITA Brookner's most searching and imaginative novel to date, Lewis Percy (Cape, £11.95), shows what can happen to a man who both adores the idea of `womankind' and attempts...

THE most satisfactory, if not the most exciting, novel of the year was Allan Massie's A Question of Loyalties (Hutch- inson, £12.95). This substantial and com- plex study of...

THE Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun, translated by Sian Evans (Camden Press, £15.95). The first unabridged version in English by that great rarity, an artist who had an...

VED Mehta's autobiographie fleuve, 'Con- tinents of Exile', will surely rank as a masterpiece of our age. It would be fasci- nating enough if the author were merely an Indian of...

THE book which has most impressed me this year is Anthony Storr's Churchill's Black Dog (Collins, £16), a collection of essays. He has a marvellous way of clari- fying...

QUITE unpredictably, the book I enjoyed most this year was Artemis Cooper's Cairo in the War 1939-1945 (Hamish Hamilton, £16.95). A splendid evocation of a city caught at an...

NEARLY a hundred writers, over 20 years, in Letters to an Editor (Carcanet, £14.95) open their hearts to the founder of Carcanet Press, Michael Schmidt, proving how deep a vein...

THE answer to the question which book did you enjoy most will have to be Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day (Fa- ber, £10.95) — helas. It is also the answer to the...

MY travel book of the year is V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South (Viking, £14.95), which recounts a journey through the Deep South of the United States. In a region haunted by...

TWO entirely different novels of contem- porary life gave me great pleasure: Martin Amis' London Fields (Cape, £12.95), probably the most unhelpfully over- promoted book this...

PROMINENT among the year's harvest, Richard Holmes's Coleridge (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.95) is absolutely up to his high standard and a book that is bound to last. The hero and...

SIR Penderel Moon's The British Conquest and Dominion of India (Duckworth, £60) costs less than a decent dinner for two in London and is a marvellous work of scholarship by a...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Sidgwick & Jackson, £12.95, pp.150 NOTEBOOKS 1924-1954 by Wilhelm Furtwangler, translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited and with an introduction by Michael...

Ours was the semi with bohemian neighbours. He was an actor on the radio, Mrs Dale's Diaries and Children's Hours. Now he does butlers and solicitors In ads and serials. It's a...

Stephen Spender THE MONKEY GRAMMARIAN by Octavio Paz Peter Owen, £14.95, pp.162 T he dazzling verbal tapestry of this performance — part prose, part poem — is so...

Duncan Fallowell WEEP NO MORE by Barbara Skelton Hamish Hamilton, £14.95, pp.166 T his is the second volume of Barbara Skelton's autobiography.It opens with a flourish. A...

Eric Christiansen CHRONICLE OF THE WORLD edited by Jerome Burne Longman, £29.95, pp. 1296 W hen I was little, I was given a very big book: as big as a small boy, but...

Samantha Weinberg DUST OF THE SAINTS by Radek Sikorski Chatto, £14.95, pp. 288 adek Sikorski went to Afghanistan wearing many hats. He was a traveller, crusader, reporter...

Foreword by Wallace Arnold Edited by Christopher Howse A splendid compilation of the best of SPECTATOR humour from the post-war years £12.95 AVAILABLE THROUGH ALL GOOD...

Denis Hills TO RUN ACROSS THE SEA by Norman Lewis Cape, f12.95, pp. 230 N orman Lewis is drawn to outlandish places rich in human frailties. The present collection of essays...

This much-praised general made such a cock of things That thousands of men were slaughtered. All may view The temple-plaque in his honour. No one sings Praise of the wives, each...

Here, in the south, the sheer heat works like booze: I lean on my desk beside North windows open wide But still the weight of warmth unbuttons me. What broke, at noon, the...

Peter Levi THE HISTORY OF WINE by Hugh Johnson Mitchell Beazley, f25, pp.480 W hat wine writers are any good? Not the ones whose metaphors float like clouds in the sunset,...

Jennifer Paterson T hick and fast they came at last and more and more and more' — just like cookery books, of which there seems to be an inexhaustible supply for every need...

John Keegan WARFARE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD edited by General Sir John Hackett Sidgwick & Jackson, .f16.95, pp. 256 T he End of History' provokes con- troversy. 'The Beginning of...

Theatre Curtains for Hamlet Christopher Edwards Hamlet (Old Vic) The Beaux' Stratagem (Lyttelton) Salome (Olivier) H ere is a chance to witness an encoun- ter between Yuri...

Seduction techniques Peter Watson o f least of the surprises in Manhattan last week was the stunning, six-foot-tall woman close to me at dinner one night who turned out to be...

Ukrainian Art 1956 - 1989 (Liberty, till 24 December) Shifting focus Giles Auty I n the past two years the focus of Western attention has shifted steadily to the East. Today...

Inner vibrations Robin Holloway T he problem of insomnia has been solved by that ingenious toy the Sony Walkman, The sleepless hours used to be something to dread: too...

A cultivated journal Ursula Buchan ales of the single-minded pursuit of excellence are not always an uplifting experience, at least for those who have to listen to them....

Tough questions Wendy Cope 4 II ave you ever been lost for words? Or stuck in front of a piece of paper wondering how to write something so that it will say exactly what you...

New York Stories ('15', selected cinemas) Tales of one city Hilary Mantel T his is a film made in three segments by three eminent American directors, each story separate, the...

Karate chopped Taki omething amazing happened on my way from the Big Olive to the Big Bagel. Actually it took place during the stupover in London. I ran into what I thought...

Bar for the course Jeffrey Bernard went to see some coursing for the first time in Ireland last week. It took place at Balbriggan in north County Dublin. That is 20 miles...

Missing pickines Zenga Longmore fi rstly, I would like to apologise in advance for any typing errors you might spot as you go along. Omalara, you see, is balanced on my lap...

Positively the last chance this year Auberon Waugh I tried a Penfolds range several years ago from Alex Findlater and it was a wild success, confirming many punters in a taste...

Spectator Wine Club, c/o Whiclar Wines Limited, Bridge, Canterbury, Kent. Telephone: (0227) 830439 White 1. Penfolds Bin 202 Gewurz Riesling '87 12 bots. Price No. Value...

A first prize of £20 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...

Ups and downs Raymond Keene P ilkington Glass made its mark in chess by sponsoring the world championship Candidates' quartet- and semi-finals in London. It was also firmly...

Cosmic grouse Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1601 you were asked to carry on for another 15 lines from this beginning: Of all the tricks the Lord has played On unsuspecting...

Greenness of Baikal THE editor of Nature has been writing about a scientific conference he went to on the shores of Lake Baikal — 'breath- taking in its audacity', he calls...

is F R 3 A 1,_L 4 C j;LI G A J E F,_1_,R, 71 LY B 01 PrESuALMIJ 17 16 R i ELA i l MI 0.2_ 0 18 19 DIRRABUNI , 20 .5. 123 CL,j?..SN P U 'HOISTS „IL 0 _g_ N 1 9 A O...

Almost 800 competitions ago, this one was set by Robert Baird and reported on by Charles Seaton, both happily still around. Belloc wrote a sonnet beginning, 'Would that I had...