T HE death of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America, in- evitably produces banality in the leader- writers who have to comment upon it. The meaninglessness...

as if a mad film projectionist mixed up cans of film, interlacing the bitter tragedy of the great American nation with a cheap Texas thriller, a detective story and comics.' So...

L VI: \ the most dimly perceptive pedestrian r:nisi by nos' have noticed a feeling among motorists that Mr. Marples is not their friend. P. is a mistaken and unjust feeling, to...

Danger ! Men at Work By DAVID WATT THAT dangerous dis- Covery of Sir Alec (– Home, modernisa- et ,s,410 tion, is now, it seems, menacing the sacred fabric of the House of...

From MURRAY KEMPTON WASHINGTON Mile television, trying as all of us have and 1 failing as all of use must, ceased to talk late on a Saturday night and gave itself over to...

From DARSIE GILLIE PARIS EFORE President Kennedy's murder the D political problem for President de Gaulle was already the changing of the guard. He had made the Franco-German...

TALKING to one of our better- known lecturers in English the other day, I was remark- ing that since there was much to be said for a certain amount of study of linguistic...

That is, if they are extremely charitable. But such attitudes are the death of thought, as they are of decency. One sees something similar in the current tone of...

But at least, you will say, Dr. Leavis is a theologian and not a Sage; while anyone who writes a column like this, giving unsolicited opinions on a range of unconnected...

I must confess to a brief spasm of anti- American feeling myself this week. 1 read The Round-the-World Cookbook by Myra Waldo. After some inept and offensive remarks about...

Not that the incompetence of the Dallas police hasn't left the affair wide open to just the sort of theory about some vast and complicated frame- up in which conspiracy-maniacs...

taking over his full responsibilities. Meanwhile, I understand that there is no truth in the suggestion that this column will in future be called A Participant's Notebook....

By RICHARD INGRAMS This atmosphere of contentment, punctuated by brief periods of 'disquiet,' partly explains the current success of 'satire.' For the whole tone of the press...

By JAMES MORRIS HANGE is the magic watchword, and the mere 1,_,suggestion that some things in Britain might best be left as they are is enough to send any politician muttering...

Failed in Divinity By JOHN BETJEMAN I WAS sent down from Oxford for failing in Holy Scripture. The cor- rect phrase for my sort of sending down was rustica- tion. My father...

Let others picnic oil champagne And rich brown croutes of pink foie gras, Or greedily fierce vodka drain Helped dowel by heaps of caviar. For others banquets fit, like these...

`Rejoice and sing,' The Young Man cried; The Glorious Spring Returns in pride. 'The skylarks trill, The pigeons nest, The daffodil Puts on her best. 'The sunbeams dance, The...

Do not mistake me, love is like a weed; She grows in rank profusion everywhere, O'er hill and vale, meadow and pasture bare And careful cultivation does not need. Friendship is...

My great-great-9,randmother, when she Bathed, back in 1853, Of vice, and scandal much afraid, Avoided the Marine Parade, And, dragged in quaint' and creaking cart To some...

So you have come at last to journey's end; Pretence is vain; You should have learned the facts of life, my friend; They've won again. Religion, 1 admit, is well enough Within...

Dreams Ours is a world divorced from time and space, A realm wherein the fancy freely flies Untrammelled by the body's carapace, Where past and future live, and present dies....

When we were young, it seemed that happiness Would come when we had reached to man's estate, And joy and hope conjoined would consummate Our triumph over childhood's long...

The nameless horror of the night, Though it hold the heart in fear, Vanishes at morning clear, Yielding to the growing light. But oh, the sorrow of the soul, Wasted years and...

of That Was The Week, died of leukemia in June he was twenty-seven, and his career as a professional artist had lasted just five years. timothy In that time he published a...

(The diaries of Cain and Lazarus Concord, like those of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, were to have been published twenty years after the death of the elder sur- viving brother....

By ANDREW ROBERTSON THE only painless Boxing Days I re- member are the ones that followed a virtuous work- 4 , ing Christmas Day, t,‘ f when perhaps one had sat self-con-...

By ROBERT ROBINSON then,' Mclntish clapped his lips to- gether, 'after the richness of the pâté,' he worked • Someone made a joke about marriage and Colonel Bowkett—the Lagos...

FREUD By CLEMENT PEOPLE / who write about books, , films or plays are prone to receive only limited abuse from a disgruntled pub- lic; readers identify themselves with a critic...

By CLIFFORD HANLEY THE most obvious delight for the gourmet during the festive season is to flee from the leaden menace of pudding and stuff- ing and refresh himself with the...

On Christmas Presents Yet there is one thing on which Consumer Groups are in full accord—that the. Best Buy for all Christmas,presents is the Spectator. The Spectator has, in...

By STANLEY PRICE, Traditionally New Year's Eve is meant to arrive with all the blessed relief of a pagan purge. It is Bacchus time, and after all the Vienna Boys' Choirs with...

The Anachronism of a Ruling Class By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT S TRESS and industrial conflict in the Twenties, depression and mass unemployment in the Thirties, frustration and...

Sin,—May I please ask your help in making known in this country the situation in Singapore today? The letter from which the following extracts have been made was written on...

Below the Bread Line Douglas Houghton, MP The Situation in Singapore George Edinger Federal Pay-off W. S. Kerr Orchestral Sizes John Burgh Wheels Within Wheels Peter Francis...

SIR,—This brief item. in your issue of October 4, intrigues: A Leicestershire man broke the world speed golf record, doing an eighteen-hole round in forty-one minutes. May 1...

The 'Spectator' offers three prizes of ten guineas and one of eight guineas in a competition open to boys and girls at school in the United Kingdom at the end of the Christmas...

am a member) agrees with much of what you have to say about the Federal civil servants of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in your editorial headed 'Federal Pay-off.' However, there arc...

SIR,—Henry Awbry comments on the failings of British cars at home. Their failings abroad are apt to be more serious. The cheaper ones are under- powered by North American...

SIR,---David Cairns has once again hit the nail on the head. The orchestra at Sadler's Wells is a blot on the generally high standards of the company. Somehow, more money must...

Partly it is a question of sight-lines. Through no fault of its architect (who was not building a theatre for ballet) you cannot see ballet very well at Covent Garden. Excluding...

The Conservative Case By DAVID CAIRNS The overture, he wrote, 'must excite in the uninitiated the impression that the Nuremberg Mastersingers were predominantly connected with...

By DAVID PRYCE-JONES The Creditors. (Ash- croft Theatre, Croy- don.) — The Ginger Man. (Royal Court.) —Uncle Vanya. (National Theatre.) The Creditors is de- scribed as a...

Family Diary. (Paris-Pull- man; 'A' certificate.)—Toys A FILM so butchered it was hard to decide about one way or another, Girl with a Suitcase, is all we have had so far in...

London steamrollered into these particular fields of St. Martin's after the Great Fire. Soho Square, for instance, was laid out in 1681. Being a neat, new enclosure of brick...

Kingsley's Heroes BY ANTHONY POWELL K INGSLEY AMTS, it is hardly necessary to remark, has a notably strong public per- sonality. This characteristic has little or nothing to do...

The Reichstag Fire : Legend and Truth. By Fritz Tobias. Translated from the German by Arnold J. Pomerans. (Seeker and Warburg, 45s.) THE Reichstag Fire is one of the landmarks...

Refusal to Conform. By James Kirkup. (O.U.P., 25s.) A GOOD thing, perhaps, to have waited a bit before reviewing this posthumous collection of Louis MacNeice's poems. At least...

She left the room undusted, did not care To hang a picture, even lay a book On the small table. All her pain was there— In absences. The furious window shook With violent...

The American People. By Oscar Handlin. (Hutchinson, 30s.) 'THERE is properly no history,' Emerson once wrote, 'only biography.' He would have been surprised to read a biography...

Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919- 1939. First Series, Vol. XIII. The Middle East : January 1920 - March 1921. Edited by Rohan Butler and J. P. T. Bury, assisted by M. E....

Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia. By Stanislaw Kot. Translated and arranged by H. C. Stevens. (O.U.P., 35s.) THE case of the Poles in the Second World...

Two flatly opposed views of education are today struggling for supremacy in England. The one for which Mr. Bantock speaks is that which has hitherto held sway—the aristocratic...

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow, Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick Till I caught him tip by the tail and...

Who Lost an American? By Nelson Algren. (Deutsch, 25s.) I'M now prepared to believe that the most im- portant literary event in the lives of Norman Mailer and Nelson Algren is...

The Dream and the Task : Literature and Morals in the Culture of Today. By Graham Hough. (Duckworth, 15s.) Experience into Words : Essays on Poetry. By D. W. Harding. (Chatto...

There must surely be sonic place though out of Ireland's island space that is properly a social place but is not a pub place? There must surely be some talk though away from...

The Intellectual Part. By Rayner Heppenstall. (Barrie and Rockliff, 25s.) Instead of a Letter. By Diana Athill. (Chatto and Windus, 21s.) RAYNER HEPPENSTALL was born of an...

MR. HECKSTALL-SMITH has written a book of remarkable interest, but his views are highly con- troversial. His story is of a proud navy which, from the moment France fell until...

Not `Guest' — The Chinese, those corrected souls, all know A guest is never billed, whereas the Essence of my aspect is, I pay— But 'Occupier' : good words cost no more. 'The...

Wagner as Man and Artist. By Ernest Newman. (Gollancz, 30s.) My Life. By Richard Wagner. (Constable 63s.) Evenings in the Orchestra. By Hector Berlioz. Translated by C. R....

IT has been said that the woman artist makes best use of her gifts after she has passed the rigours of middle life, and this theory is certainly upheld by the creative vigour of...

Thy Tears Might Cease. By Michael Farrell. With an introduction by Monk Gibbon. (Hutchinson, 25s.) Bust' writers are judged by the quality and resonance of their hatred...

By CUSTOS rTI HE tragic news of the President's assassina- tion fell on a Wall Street which had already suffered a setback. Hence the mildness of the shock. The market had...

By LOTHBURY S HAREHOLDERS in Tube Investments were probably disappointed that, for the year end- ing July 31, 1963, there was no increase in the dividend, which stays at 14 per...

MAINLY LITERARY By ALAN DENT T HE SETIER posed these questions and supplied the answers when away from his books. In checking them, both questions and Anvers, he found he had...

Toys Galore By LESLIE ADRIAN MINK buy those . . . none of them are big enough for Tim to swal- low,' 1 heard a lady shopper 'say in John Lewis's recently. Under the...

By. ELIZABETH DAVID Any cook not bound by her immediate hori- zons would I think, find that Miss Kinnan Rawlings's cookery book has all the proper attributes of a Christmas...

III 1 Balzac. 2 Henry James. 3 Thomas Hardy. 4 Dickens. 5 George Eliot. 6 R. L. Stevenson. 7 Joseph Conrad. 8 George Meredith. 9 Bulwer Lytton. 10 Emile Zola. I Marcellus in...