ESTABLISHED 1828 No. 6671 FRIDAY, MAY 4, 1956 PRICE 9d.

IF HE suggestion that some change in the nature of the North Atlantic alliance has become necessary is now to be heard from all sides. The Canadian Foreign Minister, Mr. Lester...

By Our Industrial Correspondent W ITHIN a week of the Amalgamated Engineering Union's ultimatum, hostilities have broken out over automation in the Standard works at Coventry....

By Our Middle East Correspondent Cairo M HAIIMARSKALD arrived in the Middle East when tempers were more inflamed than they had been since tilt beginning of. 1955. Fifty Arab...

BY RICHARD I N recent days, President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and Adlai Stevenson have addressed themselves to the need for rethinking several aspects of American...

By Our Paris Correspondent S OME of the present French Government difficulties spring from the last election campaign. It was conducted as if circumstances made possible a new...

By Our German Correspondent Bonn W ESTERN GERMANY'S membership of the Western Treaties paid out good dividends last week. The visit of Messrs. Bulganin and Khrushchev to Britain...

BY HENRY FAIRLIE THE importance of the Labour Party dinner—and some 1 people might remember that it was not a Government dinner—to Mr. Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin is in...

A JOINT statement by the British Prime Minister and the Russian leaders brought the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit to this country to a close, and probably provided the most...

I CAN PERFECTLY well understand why the reaction to the reports of the famous Labour Party dinner for Bulganin and Khrushchev—as they came through, first in a trickle and then...

insecure. To most of us, 1 fear, he is still the man who found something nasty in the mind's woodshed; to the professional, his theories remain a matter of vigorous and often...

1113 IS a cocktail recipe which an acquaintance was shown illtt_a,Publicity party the other day : VODKA BRUCE—Vodka. 1113 IS a cocktail recipe which an acquaintance was shown...

his wan against the Spectator Irish number, last week, wan his eye caught my reference to the Lane Pictures; it was with difficulty, he tells me, that he restrained himself 1 ,...

on behind the scenes in the BOAC shake-up. Opinion seems to be unanimous that the new appointments are a mistake; but i It s divided on whether the mistake was in putting in Mr....

Council would be put off its stroke by the busybody lowbrows w ho consider that the Council's spending a penny of public 11 °neY on works of art is an outrage against the...

BY ROY HARROD I N a pamphlet entitled The Problem of Bigness* Professol Sargent Florence demonstrates with irresistible logic tht inevitability of the trend to bigness in...

BY D. W. BROGAN I T is unnecessary to introduce Richard H. Rovere to the readers of the Spectator or of the New Yorker. He is the most philosophical and reflective of Washington...

BY LANCE HARRIS W ILHELMSHAVEN, chosen by Western Germany as the first base for her new Navy, is known among German seamen as `Schlicktown'—town of sticky g re y mud. Of all...

BY JOHN BETJEMAN ATTENDED one day of the inquiry held last week by the / Ministry of Fuel and Power at Maldon, in Essex, about the atomic power station the Central Electricity...

' UTURE events were to show that I was ' right: F The sentence is taken from a soldierly account by General Hasso von Manteuffel of Hitler's bold and temporarily successful...

man of g reat personal charm and g ood manners. What naughty dynamite did Mr. Brinnin mix in his coura g eous and brilliantly penetrating book to put John in such a paddy with...

St. John Ervine, I know enough of the country whose hospitality he and I presently enjoy to suggest that its agricultural policy should he designed to secure its essential...

SIR,—The 'abstraction' of one of the Lane Collection pictures from the Tate Gallery revives the controversy about their proper abiding place. The moral and legal arguments for...

is difficult because of the time which elapses before we in Africa can read them and in our turn write our comments. I have not the honour of knowing Edward Carpenter, but I...

The Lane Collection Harry Burrows I lYian Thomas in America Alan Hunter Stalin and Montezuma Admiral Sir William James 111 e `Spectator' on Eire Patrick Lynch ( • aPricorn...

Sit,-1 should be very glad if I might ask for your readers' help. My problem is this: My son, aged eleven, has been well-taught in a primary school and we were happy at the...

SIR,—I think Strix (who, like myself, is one of the joint authors of the recently published book on the U-question, Noblesse Oblige) has, at p. 85, been unkind to me, for he...

a sentence, about the value of the African vote, from Colonel Stirling's article to prove that distrust is misplaced. It is in the second half of the sentence that the chuse of...

German Art at the Tate HERE, for the majority to whom modern German art means little more than the words expressionism and Bauhaus, and reproductions of Franz Marc's horses, is...

the rituals he escribe s as a section of the press he so often affects to despise' i„,PeoPle selected for Cranwell cadetships—or "' l ee(' for any form of special service...

during lny period as guest critic nb c ,7, ends this week, is that, generally speakink " is go-ahead, all-embracing and interesting' Only in one programme have I discovered Os'...

Theatre.) IT was hardly possible, and not much use pre- tending, not to identify Grace Kelly's princess in 7'/re Swan at least a little with the real-life princess she had just...

Ton musical experience of last week, for the handful gathered there to receive it, was Messiten's Masse de la Pentecote for organ, played by Ralph Downes at a recital of modern...

MAY 7, 1831 CORONER'S INQUESTS.—One of these sapient tribunals sent a young woman to Bow Street last Saturday, on suspicion of child-murd er ' An infant, of which they most...

SOUTH SEA BUBBLE. By Noel Coward. (Lyric.) '0Usont les 'edges d'antattr—well, certainly i not i n Samolo for a variety of reasons, the least of which is that Samolo is a...

No Laughing Matter By KINGSLEY AMIS t here anyone to touch him, it appears, at churning out 'perfect' w riter. and—almost equally creditable in my own view—has f i c'ing to...

GEORGE MEREDITH: His Life and Work. By Jack Lindsay. (The Bodley Head, 30s.) SP EAKING as one of the corrupt petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, I always enjoy Marxist criticism—for...

LABOUR POLICY IN THE U.S.S.R. 1917-28. By Margaret De war (R.I.I.A., 45s.) .. r y SOME PROBLEMS OF INCENTIVES AND LABOUR PRODUCTIV ITY ' SOVIET INDUSTRY. By G. R. Barker....

RICHARD AUSTEN BUTLER. By Francis Boyd. (Rockliff, 15s.) POLI'T'ICS WITHOUT PREJUDICE. By Ralph Harris. (Staples, 20s.) THE dangers and difficulties of contemporary biography...

USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY. By Pieter Geyl. (O.U.P., 20s.) THESE two books are of unequal value. Signor Rossi, whose work is known to students of Lord Herbert, Berkeley and Swift,...

TWILIGHT OF THE MAHARAJAS. By Sir Kenneth Fitze. Murray, 15s.) THIS is a curious set of books. Sir Kenneth Fitze and Mr. Ev ans Thomas both have extremely good subjects. One is...

of of local colour,. uncommonly well done and not at all g agged in, because Mexican character, and even climate, play i Il eir part in the plot. A good long read, with hot...

time.' Blonde nympho gets hers, and ex-lover loyally suspects tlereaved husband.

THE LORD HAVE MERCY. By Shelley Smith. (Hamish Hamilton, 1 , p i llage 6 d.) Beautifully written, well-controlled study of why the 1, "ak doctor's bitchy wife was murdered; and...

THE DESERT AND THE STARS. By Flora Armitage. (Faber and Faber, 25s.) MISS FLORA ARMITAGE has made a praiseworthy attempt to be objective in this latest biography of T. E....

6d.) Dublin —black markets, bacon and eggs, no black-out, and passes benders. On one such bender, businessman-playboy wa rn oin and believes himself poisoned—as many such must...

matter-of-fact, readable twist to the Burgess-Maclean story: suppose You don't take secrets to' the Soviet Union but only t ',K as though you do—and then claim damages from the...

There's an almost Daisy Ashford-ish innocence of eye and of expression about Milly Brown's Doctor Watsoning to Flora Hogg's Sherlock Holmesing, and spine-chilling accounts of...

12s. 6d.) This only partly pronounceablepair are 4h r l e ntlY conjuring up the most ingeniously mystifying plots— ''' c onvincing explanations—in the business; and all the more...

41 5f t - centred toughie, like many a run-of-the-mill, exciting docu- i k en , l arY-gangster film, of hoods, framers-uppers, and mere ‘ Ho le - crossers on New York's...

And this is what happens when a once first-rate detective-story twriter decides to rely solely on local colour, cramming in every- bla g that an American tripper would regard as...

Irish d .) Benders spin the plot, too, in this (I think) Northern , t ale of the good-fellow barfly who may or may not have killed "roan acquaintance in the course of an...

NEVER am I so thankful to be living in the twentieth century, even under an atomic cloud, than when I read the gorier sorts of historical fiction. Not that the gore in Maurice...

IN Joshua Whatmough's Language : A Modern Synthesis (Seeker and Warburg, 25s.) learned term hotly pursues learned term and all too often there is no clear indication of the way...

AT a first glance at The Symphonies.of 1 01( 1 Haydn, by H. C. Robbins Landon (Univ els$ ' Edition and Rockliff, £6), the content of splendid and necessary book seems almost i t...

GREEK archbishops from time to time hit the headlines in our newspapers—because of their political, not their ecclesiastical, activities, The constitution and condition of the...

DOROTHY WELLESLEY, without trying to out- sing or outrun anyone, has maintained an individual tone and a steady pace, and is much nearer the goal than many who measure their...

A Gallery of Mirrors, by Richard Heron Ward (Gollancz, 16s.), is a rare book. Mr. Ward has drawn a series of portraits, in part no doubt touched up with the pencil of his...

IT would have been easier to congratulate I bt publishers on the speed with which 01 1 brought out the English text of San ug Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Faber, 9c. 641 if in...

of SO,' Beckett's French novels. seems to be v SI „ adequately done; indeed it should b 0.1 the author has himself collaborate d M Patrick Bowles, the translator. M0110)., A )...

By CUSTOS THE market in industrial ordinary shares has come back five points from the top of its post-Budget recovery, and as a Stock Exchange account was ending on Tuesday...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THE Chancellor is a practical man and perhaps the reason why he decided against a capital gains tax as one of the ways and means to restrict consumer...

a get t i„ an tith who had several novel ways of tisb--one of them with a hammer with Ne ' k en he would strike boulders and exposed at low water, stunning the fish which he rt...

BY IAN NIALL TIIAT different people see very different things I 4111 always discovering. I have a friend who Gin never look at a new housing estate with- ' I nt getting worked...

read the other day, since ttl e , s Ytern of marking birds in this way began ret a ils nd of the last century. According to Wildlife it s Published by the American Fish and...

BY PHILIDOR No. 48. C. W. SHEPPARD BLACK (5 men) WHITE (7 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's problem by Hartong: Q-K 2,...

In the successful care of a hedge there arc two main months for putting things in order— May and September. Hollies and laurels are best trimmed with a knife, but privet, box...

A. 13. STmART , Street, Clare, Suffolk, and MR. E. G. Hose, Yuttendon, NewburY,

A prize of six guineas was offered for a sonnet using the rhymes given as'illustration of this verse form by the Concise Oxford Dictionary (e.g., pig bat cat wig jig hat rat...

Pure water is the best of gifts that moo l° man can bring, But who am I that I should have the be st of everything? Let princes revel at the pump, let peers Wi th' ponds make...

ACROSS 1 'And that one - which is death to hide' (Milton) (6). 4 Although the poor usher was in debt, he was genial (8). 9 The tongue of a shoe (6). 10 The author of I could...