'Honest, it fell off the back of a lorry.' I RA bombs exploded at the Stock Ex- change in London, damaging only the building, and in Armagh, killing a Roman Catholic nun and...

Telephone: 071-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 071-242 0603 THE SCARGILL DISASTER scandal over the disposal of very large sums of money donated by Soviet and East European miners...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY - Save 10% 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 Airmail...

Bringing down the curtain on the Whitehall raree-show NOEL MALCOLM T o make 24 new ministerial appoint- ments can hardly be described as a non- event; and yet the reshuffle...

ALEXANDRA ARTLEY 0 n Saturday the arrival of 95 children from the Chernobyl area of the Soviet Union, to spend a fortnight's holiday with British guides and scouts, was another...

Ian Buruma examines the nostalgia for socialism in East Germany, where intellectuals mourn the sacrifice of national spirit and identity to the new capitalism Berlin SOME...

Anthony Daniels reports on the horrible consequences of Maoist zealotry Ayacucho IT IS difficult to resist the conclusion that Peru is bankrupt. Inflation is running at 40 per...

Keith Joseph enters the debate, opposing any rush to European Monetary Union SAM Brittan's article last week in favour of European Monetary Union run by a European central bank...

Michael Heath

Daniel Johnson recalls a historical precedent to the Ridley affair and its reverberations `YOU English are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you are so...

Ash wrote of Chancellor Kohl's neo-Adenauerian (not, as printed, neo-American) commitment to further integration in the West European Com- munity.

Sandra Barwick on the hypocrisy of not speaking plainly about sexual abuse of children THOSE whose are squeamish should perhaps not continue to read this article. It contains...

Damian Thompson asks whether Christian Aid can remain a charity 'HAS everyone got their pipe cleaners?' asked the man on the stage. 'Now you know what to do. Twist them into a...

IT'S terrible to be ill, of course, but it's far worse to be a doctor. That's why so many anaesthetists end up sniffing their own gases; why pathologists choose the monastic...

The media: Paul Johnson on the growing inconsistencies of the Rushdie affair WE ARE getting ourselves into an ever- deepening mess over Rushdie. Let us recapitulate. A young...

SHREDDED Wheat is on the move. The cereal oven-scrapers have been sold en bloc by Ranks Hovis McDougall for £97 million, and it is said that the new owners, Nestle and General...

HOW does the Treasury do it? Is there a cloning laboratory, somewhere down those endless puce corridors, where they pro- duce indistinguishable youngish ministers and set them...

No power to the people, but tell Ski: Hanson is as Hanson does CHRISTOPHER FILD ES J ohn Wakeham is a minister for impro- ving the Government's communications, a point which...

THE Bank of England's Quarterly Bulletin burst upon the waiting world with all the impact of a feather falling on a blanc- mange. So, alas, said its first reviewer, Roger Opie...

TUT, tut, Ffangois, these Brits are nothing but a lot of round-eyed Japanese. Quite so, Helmut, I can't think how we ever let them in. Our predecessors . . Quite so. They...

Yugoslavia United? Sir: In an early preface to her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West wrote a warning. She had noted the phe- nomenon of people from Britain and else-...

21 July) says in essence that we ought to surrender our sovereignty to a federal Europe as the necessary price for persuading Germany to do the same. But, if a unified Germany...

Sir: May I say what our politicians dare not say? I was sorry to see Mr Ridley leave the Government, for in part his brief excursion in print via The Spectator urged us to...

it must be worrying to some of the more historically minded of the older generation that Prussia, which forms such a large part of the DDR, is now back in the German fold. These...

the South Wales Echo: 50 YEARS AGO Hitler intended to launch a blitzkrieg on Britain, said Mr Beverley Baxter MP. He said Hitler intended to offer Europe a federation scheme,...

Sir: If Mr Brittan can produce a single scrap of evidence to support his view that Poles were responsible for 'wartime mas- sacres' (Three cheers for monetary union', 21 July),...

Sir: I am afraid that Noel Malcolm gets the country and the exchange wrong in the first paragraph of his article last week about Nicholas Ridley (Politics, 21 July). What...

Sir: Having on several occasions looked down on Mr Ferdinand Mount, rubicund and giving evidence of moderate rational- ity, I am taken aback to read in his review of my book...

Sir: Geoffrey Wheatcroft is right (Diary. 14 July) in noticing that young profession- als in Lpndon are eating later in the evening, but he omits to point out that the reason...

Sir: I learn that Gazeta Wyborcza (a Polish daily founded in May 1989) is unable to write in objective terms about Lech Walesa (When old friends fall out', 30 June). Supposedly...

Sir: I am a total devotee of the admirable and engaging Lord Hailsham — and not least for his appreciation of Jack Russells. But he is deluding himself and history if he (rather...

Cutting a wooden dash John Diamond W hat I want to know,' said a recent correspondent of one of the dozen or so old car magazines, 'is whether my 1976 Ford Capri is a classic...

Digby Anderson T he Times man was explaining recently how the `jockey-style riding crouch' on the rotary-engined JSP — or was it JPS? was only awkward at first. The language of...

WHEN the Census Bill was being dis- cussed on Tuesday night, Baron Dims- dale proposed to ask for the religious profession of each person, as well as their age, sex, profession...

Nobody here but us chickens George Melly THE FABER COMPANION TO 20TH-CENTURY POPULAR MUSIC by Phil Hardy and Dave Laing Faber, £20,.pp.875 A nother doorstop-size book of...

In the corded hollows of the wood leaves fall. How light it is. The trees are rinsing themselves of leaves like Degas laundresses, their forearms cold with the jelly-smooth...

Alethea Hayter NEGLECTED GENIUS: THE DIARIES OF BENJAMIN HAYDON edited by John JolWe, Hutchinson, £19.99, pp.250 W hile the whole world seems adverse to desert', Wordsworth...

Philip French SILVER LIGHT by David Thomson Deutsch, £12.95, pp.333 D avid Thomson was educated at Dul- wich College, the alma mater of P. G. Wodehouse, C. S. Forester and...

Eric Christiansen A HISTORY OF ALCOHOLISM by Jean-Charles Sournia Blackwell, £25, pp. 232 A lcoholism is not as old as you might think, walking round the museums and noting...

Don Cupitt THE APE THAT SPOKE by John McCrone Macmillan, f13.95, pp.231 I t is so hard to imagine the first origins of mind and language that in antiquity they were often...

Beatrice Wilson THE RED CABBAGE CAFE by Jonathan Treitel Bloomsbury, £13.99, pp. 183 e's a novelist, of course. Not that he's published much at all. He can write the...

Patrick Skene Catling LETTERS FROM HENRY MILLER TO HOKI TOKUDA MILLER edited by Joyce Howard Hale, £12.95, pp. 163 T he most extraordinary thing about this sweet-and-sour,...

I contemplate my orderly logs unkindly minded of mediaeval souls stacked up for judgment, a year's burning, none to be reexamined: the judgment autocratic, no jury summoned. I...

Duncan Fallowell SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia Yale, £25, pp.718 hat is the overall thesis here? The operation of sexual archetypes in art and literature. But there has...

'An increasing number of pupils are being educated at independent schools, and about 50 per cent of the parents who choose this for their children were not themselves educated...

J. Enoch Powell PAGAN VIRTUE: AN ESSAY IN ETHICS by John Casey OUP, f27.50, pp 242 D r• Casey has written a strange and difficult book, but it is a book which repays the...

Exhibitions Frances Hodgkins (Whiteford & Hughes till 14 August) Alexis Hunter (Odette Gilbert till 7 August) Antipodean artists in exile Giles Auty L ike Henri Matisse,...

English National Ballet (London Coliseum) Musical chairs Deirdre McMahon 0 ver the last year several of the world's major ballet companies have been Playing a complicated...

The Silver King (Chichester Festival Theatre ) A cut above melodrama Christopher Edwards H enry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) was considered, in his time, to be an lbsenite'....

Inflation and perversion Alistair McAlpine T here has been much holding of breath in the world's major sale-rooms in the last few months — a couple of Van Goghs passed the...

Interrogation (`18' Premiere, Swiss Centre) Process of torture Hilary Mantel T onia is an `artiste'; in Poland, in 1951, she warbles and wiggles in fishnet tights a lame...

Once again, The Spectator is offering its readers the definitive Pocket Diary, offering all the facts and figures that are essential to any Spectator reader, bound in soft black...

forthcoming events recommended by The Spectator's regular critics OPERA Le Huron, Buxton Festival from 2 August. Rarely performed opera by 18th-century Belgian composer...

A knight in shining Armani Taki Latis is the man who paid for the ex-Greek King's ball, and he is the man ' who has taken over Bridgewater House and was photographed amidst...

Very like a man Miles Kington 0 ne of the most haunting television programmes I have ever seen was the film made by Mark Lewis about the cane toad, the squat beast that seems...

Telephonic hang-ups Zenga Longmore A lthough the weather last week was hot enough to fry plantains in their skins, it came as no surprise to see Uncle Bisi calling at my door...

A doctor's calling Jeffrey Bernard T he build up to this latest move had me cracking at the mental seams. I haven't known such anxiety and depression for an age. But at least...

I TOLD the tale in this column of the pig slaughtering I went to near Seville. Well, I met the pig man again the other week, Sam Chesterton and his wife, and we sat in a...

12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY COMPETITION 12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY Chez Adolf Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1635 you were asked for an extract from a dispatch home by a...

Cut short Raymond Keene A few weeks ago I celebrated the eightieth birthday of the brilliant veteran grandmaster Miguel Najdorf. This week I turn to the career of a player who...

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I regularly set this type of competition because many of you rise so triumphantly to the occasion. Here is my new challenge. Incorporate the following words into a plausible...

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 solutions...

Indian summer Frank Keating I'M rooting for India — or will be pronto if England begin to plod along, just waiting for something to turn up. Certainly the series promises well...