Established 1828 99 Gower Street, London WC1E 6AE Telephone: 01-387 3221 Telegrams: Spectator, London Editor: George Gale Associate Editor: Michael Wynn Jones Literary Editor:...

Mr Barber's return to economic common sense Ambition is no bad thing, particularly in a Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is no doubt that Mr Barber had to set his sights...

Any breaking-up of the .BBC's monstrous empire cannot be wholly bad. Any chipping- off must leave the great monolith weaker than it was. The BBC broods over our lives like the...

Budget Day was quite the balmiest day of this year so far. At exactly the time Tony Barber rose in the Commons, I saw a girl driving down Gower Street in an opened convertible,...

I looked in the window of Heal's, the smart- furniture furniture shop, and saw five clocks on display. They had been given one of the Council of Industrial Design awards, and...

There was never much doubt about the technical and moral guilt of little Lt Calley and his squad. They obeyed superior orders when they should not have done so, and they...

Overheard in Turpin's restaurant, Hamp- stead, where they do a special Sunday roast- beef and treacle pud kind of English lunch, Norman St John-Stevas saying with his usual...

A few days later I checked again, this time with a colleague, to make sure that the clocks still told different times. They did. (There was three-quarters of an hour differ-...

Seldom have I watched anything less funny than a series of 'jokes' about smoking taken from old silent films and shown on tele- vision last Sunday evening. There has al- ways...

Congratulations to the Daily Tele,eraph's young Simon Dring who, accompanied by Associated Press photographer Michel Laurent, appears to be the only reporter to have avoided...

BY 'AN ECONOMIST' The most hopeful and forward-looking budget since the end of the war, so forward looking, indeed, that it is almost as if the chancellor has already...

Wednesday 24 March: Fresh from his brief Belfast visit on Saturday, Government trouble- shooter Lord Carrington was sent off to Wash- ington for his Task of the Week—to finally...

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An extended sentence NORMAN FOWLER, MP On 14 December last year a twenty-day trial at the Old Bailey finished and with it the careers of three London policemen effectively...

- • SALLY VINCENT We are, it would appear, shortly to find ourselves facing up to a future in a land unfit for chauvinist heroes. Noble Lords permit- ting, we are about to...

The price of domestic bliss MACDONALD HASTINGS Annual Income: £427 is 2d Estimated Expenditure: £426 19s Od Actual Expenditure: £430 9s 6/d That was my grandfather's budget...

In defence of shop stewards JACK JONES Vic Feather's Essence of Trade Unionism,* written originally in 1963 is perhaps best - treated as a piece of historical documen- tation....

Joseph Lee on Victorian social history Reviews by John Danby, Simon Raven, David Hare and Christopher Sykes. Auberon Waugh on new novels Patrick Cosgrave: Politicians at war...

Spectator 11111111•1 MS NMI 11111111111 IIMMIll The Spectator. 99 Gower Street, London W.C.I Please supply the Spectator for one year f_71 two years fi Cheque enclosed D -...

Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff William Inge (Andre Deutsch £1.50) Many distinguished and excellent novelists have started writing novels late in life—L. P. Hartley springs to mind and...

Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love: An Ex. amination of the Possibility of Common Readings of 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Othello', 'King Lear', 'Antony and Cleopatra' H. A. Mason (Chatto...

Mallet's Male ficarumn Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, translated from the Latin by Montague Summers (Arrow Books 50p) Malleus Maleficarutn, otherwise Hexen. hammer or The...

Social history has long been regarded as a hold-all for the bits and pieces left over by more institutionalised historians. Even now, when it is rapidly achieving positive...

Understanding Human Sexual Inadequacy is the layman's guide to another volume, Hu- man Sexual Inadequacy by the famous Wil- liam H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson— itself a...

The First Bourbon Desmond Seward (Constable £2.75) It is safe to say that more books have been written about royalty than about any other class of man. The reason is clearly to...

Patrick Cos- grave, the Bishop of Durham, Marcus Cunlitfe and Maurice Zinkin.

Charles Seaton reports: In 'A Farewell to Tobacco' Charles Lamb wrote : For thy sake, Tobacco, I Would do any thing but die. Competitors were invited to offer in verse advice...

A prize of £3 will be awarded for the first correct solution opened on 13 April. Address solutions: Crossword 1475, The Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London WC1 Across 1 Were...

No. 644: 0 tempora! A 'dolphinarium' is being opened in London's Oxford Street. This double assault on the English language and the animal kingdom invites com- ment....

9 Ausonian 10 Skirts 12 Pleased 13 Handler 14 Swallow-tails 17 Disillusions 22 Overall 23 Gesture 24 Spiral 25 Starcher 26 Nugget 27 Cromlech. Down: I Sharps 2 Austen 3 Handsaw...

• MONEY. LEISURE CINEMA Getting away with murder CHRISTOPHER HUDSON It is fortunate, considering the parlous state of the local industry, that foreign films don't face the...

The little boys in the band KENNETH HURREN There are those who would have you believe that to take a frivolous view of Henry de Montherlant's La Ville dont le Prince est tin...

On Velvet DUNCAN FALLO WELL While browsing through an Oxford record shop in 1967, I came across an album captioned The Velvet Under- ground and Nico, pro- duced by Andy...

The optimist Patrick SKENE CAT1ANG Crosby's present columns, now written for the Observer, are mostly about Crosby. He is one of the people who disseminated the !lotion that...

Sir: The present atmosphere of the Common Market negotiations must be causing dismay to all those who subscribe seriously to the idea that Britain's future lies with the Six....

Sir: It is apparent that Peregrine Worsthorne's (27 March) apprec- iation of twentieth century Amer- ican history is as abysmal as his understanding of economics and his...

that 'it is clearat the moment that most .Ulstermen wish to remain part of the United Kingdom'. Can I remind him that the province of Ulster has nine count- ies. It is not...

Sir, 'Auberon Waugh on George Brown' says that 'there is a Foreign Office man in Bush House vetting overseas broadcasts on, a non- voluntary basis, and has been since Suez'....

From: Muriel Anderson, Ewart Milne, 0. J. Whitley, Charles Har- ris and others. Faulkner's Ulster Sir: The British press is almost unanimous in giving the Stormont parliament...

Ulster' (27 March) that 'This is not a "war" against an "enemy" unless it be clearly understood that the "enemy" is a hundred or two people; the Army in Ulster sup- ports the...

article (20 March) on the anti-Common Market demonstration I feel I must correct two impressions that readers may have gained from the article. First a specific point. Although...

to end his com- ments on my poem, 'The Child Speaks'(20March)with a joke about the IRA. The IRA is no joking mat- ter; neither is the sight of children getting 'high' on...

Sir: John Casey is surely unfair in accusing George Orwell (13 March) of patronising the work- ing classes. Leaving aside the point that he was an outsider— not to say an...

Sir: During the past few weeks I have written two letters to a national daily newspaper, as follows: I. Schools and instrument makers seem to be assuming that a change from...

been connected with Cawnpore (now Kanpur), India. in order to write a history of Cawnpore during the past 200 years. based on first-hand accounts. If any of your readers have...

Sir: I am engaged on the author- ised biography of the late Hugh Gaitskell. If any of your readers have letters from him in their pos- session I should be most grateful to be...

Sir: Mr Faber's article (20 March) on the disruptive potentialities of the Free Communications Group makes frightening reading and con- firms my worst suspicions of the...

Sir: I feel I must make some comment on Simon Raven's ar- ticle 'Dust and Ashes' (20 March). I get the impression that when he first heard that Illingworth was to captain the...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT The pre-budget White Papers painted the economic backcloth for Mr Barber's massive tax-reform performance on Tuesday. Last year the gross national product...

This Saturday the annual hell-for-leather stampede round Aintree rolls into action for yet one more 'final' run, and although the Grand National will not be allowed to die...

I would like to add to Nicholas Davenport's recent cautionary tales about the oil industry the following thought: will the capital market be able to keep pace with the oil...

The Times, Friday 26 March : 'Post Office investigation officers were try- ing to find out yesterday how letters came to be blocking a lavatory at Croydon main sorting office....

It was Robert Benchley, I think, who said that you could divide the world into two kinds of people : those who divided the world into two kinds of people and others. Two kinds...

Last week, a fine comedy called Father's Day by Oliver Hailey closed on Broadway after just one performance largely as a result of a hostile review in the New York Times by its...

The Rolls-Royce crash was supposed to be a salutary lesson to all irresponsible strikers. It wasn't. They went on as if it had never oc- curred. But it has struck deep into the...

If you should decide, after a fortnight or so perhaps, that there are other pleasures to be sought in the Channel Islands apart from drinking and smoking duty-free, and throw-...

Last week my wife and I both fell'victims to the most beguiling of all temporary illusions. Whether or not we tumbled together through a tiny crack in the space-time continuum,...

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