For all their bluster and rather factitious hostility, both Party leaders know that they are steering very tight courses over immigration. Mr Callaghan appeals for the question...

Chopper and the Scots Ferdinand Mount Mr Michael Cocks sits tight on the front bench. He is a little pink about the cheeks. He wears a frozen little smile beneath his neat...

Like government departments, local authorities are a byword for wastefulness and extravagance. Some are worse than Others, of course. I am not, thank heaven, a ratepayer in the...

A plague of leeches Auberon Waugh It can only, I suppose, have been an accident that I was reading a book sent me by the Association of Polish Students and Graduates in Exile:...

Xan Smiley Valletta Perhaps, to give Dr Owen his due, the fact that all the key actors in the Rhodesian Yawn have spurned him with the same lack of sportsmanship suggests a...

Sam White Paris This time Giscard came clean. In what was generally acknowledged to have been the most effective speech he has ever delivered since becoming President, he spelt...

David Levy Calgary, Alberta Like Americans, Russians really know next to nothing about Canada, a country which to both super-powers is the northern neighbour. If anything, the....

Henry Fairlie Washington The most exciting news on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday was that James Callaghan is now regarded as a miracle man in Britain. This...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington The snow and the bad weather have given the nation a case of cabin fever. That's the only explanation for the aimless grousing and griping....

Leo Abse Is Peter Shore, our Secretary of State for the Environment, now in purdah? The saga of the Windscale Inquiry is completed: a few days ago there landed upon the...

Peregrine Worsthorne Any call for denying noblemen a hereditary right to a seat in Parliament is certain to seem sensible in the present democratic climate. So Lord Home's...

Adam Fergusson Burns Night last week was a stirring time to be in the House of Commons. The Government was defeated three times in a row, making four in the week; and the...

Tony Craig No one took very much notice when, on 11 January, Camden Council in London unanimously and unceremoniously adopted a draft policy statement entitled 'Equal...

The Governor's monetarism Nicholas Davenport I see that Gordon Richardson is to go on for another five years. I was speaking to a friend who replied: 'I thought he had retired...

Sir: I note with regret that Alec Clegg has not taken up my invitation to spell out in sufficient detail the precise nature of the virtues he claims as attending the drop in...

Sir: I was most surprised and distressed to read such a scathing editorial on Mr Heath, who still retains the respect of many in the Conservative Party. The level of the...

harshly reveals the situation confronting the Conservative Party with regard to Mr Edward Heath. As Mr Heath's lack of judgment becomes apparent so the mirror reflects the true...

Sir: Lady Hunt says (21 January) there was 'no genocide' in the Biafra conflict. Two million dead (she adds) is 'an absurd figure'; even propagandists 'have come down to one...

Sir: Mr Michael Foot, writing in the Spectator of 14 January, finds occasion to remark that the Constitution of the United States 'is suffused with Jeffersonian cum-Thomas...

Sir: So Patrick Marnham (28 January) chooses to ignore my evidence (21 January) that Begin never said about Deir Yassin that the massacre was justified. Mr Marn ham may ignore...

Sir: Mr Davenport's article of 14 January was as always most perceptive and gives a timely warning about the dangers inherent in the current euphoria. In particular, the figure...

Sir: Alastair Forbes (28 January) states that High Diver reproduces only one of Michael Wishart's paintings: a closer study might have revealed to him the portrait of Nureyev...

Sir: A propos your leading article (14 January) about the McKinnon affair, may I comment? In all fairness to Judge McKinnon it should be remembered that a previous judge could...

The good old days? John Grigg The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression John Stevenson and Chris Cook (Jonathan Cape 0.45) In his Oxford history of England 1914 to...

Anthony Holden From Apes to Warlords SoIly Zuckerman (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) One of the first Portraits of the Author As A Young Man in this book is a photo of SoIly Zuckerman,...

Norman MacKenzie The 1945 Revolution William Harrington and Peter Young (Davis-Poynter £6.50) Among my Christmas reading was a facsmile copy of Picture Post for 4 January...

Alan Watkins You Have a Point There Eric Partridge (Routledge £2.50 paper) Eric Partridge, a New Zealander by origin, is eighty-four. For years he has written with dedication...

Emma Fisher The Noise Made by Poems Peter Levi (Anvil Press £3.25) Selected Poems 1940-1972 Barbara Norman (Tuba Press £2.80) On the Rocks Sebastian Barker (Martin Brian &...

Patrick Cosgrave I had begun to feel that those myriad tales of CIA-KGB rivalry, full of complicated entrapments, deceived innocents, and the inevitable sacrifice of the...

Paul Ableman By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept Elizabeth Smart (Polytaritric Press E2.95, For my maiden review in this journal, I was offered a choice of two books,...

Benny Green Jack: A life of Jack London Andrew Sinclair (Weidenfeld £6.95) Jack London is the oddball hero of the Socialist pantheon, the rugged he-man crusader whose heavy...

American styles and chic John McEwen History is beginning to sort out the abstract expressionists. Not all their paintings were or are big, but most of them were a lot bigger...

Red-hot Ted Whitehead Dingo (Warehouse) Laughter (Royal Court) Rose petals flutter down over the fallen as a voice intones: 'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow...

Anti-heroines Clancy Sigal Julia (Odeon Haymarket) It would be easy to dismiss Julia (A) as a slick romantic fantasy, or even as a sac charine exploitation of a...

Home-made Richard Ingrams The only politician a politician is interested in is himself. It follows that a programme of Harold Wilson talking about Churchill will only tell us...

Frenzied Takt New York Imagine an airline hangar decorated by Salvador Dali, all nightmarish mauve, blue strobe lights flashing, crimson neon tubes blinking, punk-chic disco...

Miss £3 million Jeffrey Bernard I can't get over the woman who somehow contrived to lose £3 million on the did green baize. The whole story is distinctly irritating. Actually,...