T HE Postmaster-General last week issued directives to the BBC and ITA confirming the position whereby all discussion on wireless or television of any subject that is going to...

ESTABLISHED 1828 No. 6632 FRIDAY, AUGUST 5, 1955 PRICE 7d.

T HE loss during July of a further 136 million dollars from the sterling area's central reserves fully confirms the forecasts of the pessimists. This is one of the worst monthly...

'What I expected was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles . '. .' S O Mr. Stephen Spender began a poem of disenchantment in which he recorded the discovery that life, helpless...

I N the dearth of real news which marks the beginning of the silly season the newspapers have had to do as best they may with the annual vicissitudes of Bank Holiday crowds and...

Mr. A. D. C. Peterson writes : HE elections in the Federation of Malaya last week pro- duced two surprises : the overwhelming nature of the Alliance victory and the size of the...

BY HENRY FAIRLIE T HE Prime Minister, I gather, has decided whom he wishes to appoint as Sir Walter Monckton's successor at the Ministry of Labour. He is Mr. Iain Macleod, the...

according to the instructions of the horse's trainer, since the race may be run in a way quite different from what the trainer envisaged. A trainer such as C. Elliot, who used...

upon us. I have every sympathy with the news editors who have to fill their newspapers during August, and it is with no intent to mock them that I suggest that during the next...

of the Labour Party conference which has been published this week, there is one from Aberdeen which calls for the 'abolition of the aristocracy, evident in the House of Lords...

IN ONE WEEK'S time, if the course of true 'justice' still runs smoothly, a man whose sanity is seriously to be questioned will be hanged for a crime committed over three years...

year has got off to a really promising start. After all the cries of 'Wolfl ' (or 'Bug-eyed-monster!' rather) from people con- vinced that other worlds are watching us from...

BY DAVID ORMSBY GORE, MP T HE new thinking in the Labour Party has got off to a somewhat hysterical start. Lord Alexander of Hills- borough, a senior Minister in the Labour...

BY ANTHONY HARTLEY D RIVING from the airport through the suburbs you do not notice the ruins so much these days. Indeed, it must always have been harder to tell if the villas or...

BY DAVID WATT T HE smooth turf of Twickenham glowed under the admiring gaze of 40,000 devotees; a mass of public- garden flowers and a small brass band were potted out on the...

THREE prizes of eight guineas each are offered for the three best original descriptive'reports (between 500 words and 750 words) of any notable event occurring between July 1,...

BY JOHN BETJEMAN N ow is the time of summer conferences and con- ventions. Sanitary engineers in drainpipe shorts, their wives in summer dresses, stroll through the gardens of...

On Going to the Moon S PACE! The challenge of the wheeling and unconquered planets, the awful immensities of the ionosphere, the ultra-violet light stabbed unpredictably by...

life in the Highlands and islands of Scotland is accustomed to being dismissed as a woolly-minded romantic. I am therefore prepared for this and similar accusations when I call...

gies of new verse have appeared under the imprint of Messrs. Michael Joseph, and you have been kind enough to allow me to invite your readers to submit poems for considera- tion...

The Financial Outlook P. R. Lane Hogarth Peter Quennell The Doomed Island Moray McLaren Little Dorrit PK W. Robson PEN New Poems David Carver THE FINANCIAL OUTLOOK SIR,—It is...

SIR,—Mr. John Wain, reviewing Mr. Lionel Trilling's The Opposing Self (July 29), criti- cises 'adversely' Mr. Trilling's essay on Little Dorrit. He complains that though Mr....

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of William Hogarth (July 22), Mr. Angus Wilson—among other- pertinent criticisms about which it would ill become me to dispute with him—remarks that, although 1 cite the Burney...

Theatre KIM LEAR. By William Shakespeare. (Palace.) I AM pretty traditional about King Lear. That is, I like it performed against scenery vaguely resembling Stonehenge and in...

A Comm complaint among the cognoscenti of Paris is that there are few truly 'theatrical' dramatic critics in France. Most of us, it appears, have literary rather than theatrical...

THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH. (Rialto.)—THE LAST COMMAND. (Dominion and New Victoria.) BioLocis - rs aver that every seven years the human body becomes entirely reconstituted. If the...

THE Tate has put on show in one of the small Duveen Turner rooms a group of recent acquisitions, most of which have been bequeathed or lent to the collection; two of them,...

TALL STORY CLUB demonstrates again to what lengths the Lime Grove gentlemen will go to put a barrier of baloney between inter- esting people and the audience. I'm all for the...

AUGUST 7, 1830 THE Royal Family . . . visited Kew Gardens on Monday. We do not know what are the inclinations of his Majesty touching gardens; the late King, we believe, knew...

Samuel Deronda By JOHN WAIN s AMUEL DERONDA'S parents had never heard of George Eliot, so that it was no more than a coincidence that they did not have their only son...

BY IAN FLEMING S OME people are frightened by silence and some by noise. To some people the anonymous bulge at the hip is more frightening than the gun in the hand, and all one...

MAN OF EVEREST. The autobiography of Tenzing, told by James Ramsey Ullman. (Harrap, 18s.) THEIR own stories by the two who reached the summit of Everest make an instructive...

CITY DIVIDED: BERLIN, 1955. By Ewan Butler. (Sidgwick and Jackson, 16s.) Do you remember how American war-correspondents, cabling from the Savoy, strained their superlatives to...

THE LIFE OF J.-K. HUYSMANS. By Robert Baldick. (O.U.P., 42s.) THERE are signs of a revival of interest both in France and this country in the French novelists of the late...

THE DAY OF THE MONKEY. By David Karp. (Gollancz, 15s.) IT sometimes seems that the novel is turning into a Wailing Wall for Liberals. More and more novels are chewing anxiously...

WITHOUT THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD. By Jean Stoetzel. (Heinemann / U.N.E.S.C.O., 16s.) DESPITE her defeat in war and the recent ascent of Red China, Japan remains one of...

To celebrate the twenty-fifth birthday of the Crime Club (Collins's celebrated institution for the publication of detective stories), Penguins are reissuing ten of the most...

Van Deusen. (University of Pennsylvania, $5.) HORACE GREELEY, founder of the New York Tribune, editor, political commentator, eccen- tric, is a splendid example of the...

No Englishman has taught so many people to climb as Jerry Wright, who reigned for years as the senior guide of the Lake District, and has since become the founder and moving...

6d.) A Slim . IN THE PARK. By William Plomer. (Cape, 7s. 6d.) THIS small collection of Mr. Plomer's novelties reveals a most pleasing development in his verse, away from the...

Irishman, Welshman and Scot. His study is academic and thorough. It covers the period from the Elizabethan drama to the end of the eighteenth century and, with such a large area...

and letters flourished as never before. It is also perhaps the period of China's history best known to us in the West, both from the treasures of its ceramic artists and from...

SAINT ON THE MARCH. By Hallam Tennyson. (Gollancz, 13s. 6d.) THIS book should have been given a better title, for it contrives in a couple of hundred very readable pages to...

A friend whom I suspect has missed his vocation—he would have made a wonderful Hyde Park heckler—asked me the other day, 'Do you believe in selective weedkillers?' It was a...

BY IAN NIALL WALKING along the banks of a lake last week 1 came upon a great army of young frogs. They were, of course, the result of the assembling of an earlier army of frogs...

Leaf miner is a great scourge in some gardens, disfiguring plants including celery and chrysanthemums. The maggot burrows its way about the leaf making unsightly channels and...

While one reader writes to suggest that the saliva cure for warts may owe its origin to Harley Street rather than to old country medicine, a remarkable list of ancient cures...

BY PHILIDOR No. 9..1. BUNTING WHITE 10 play and mate in 2 moves: solution next week. Taken from 'The Problemist,' May 1955—a never- I. failing source of first-class problems....

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT IT is strange that while Mr. Butler failed to rout the bulls of industrial equity shares last week with his anti-inflation attack, a moderate setback in...

By CUSTOS A SHARP setback in industrial ordinary shares at the beginning of the week was accompanied by some slight recovery in the gilt-edged market. This is based on the...

An essay in self-criticism like Eliot's 'How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot . . would be a chastening theme for many poets. A prize of was offered for not more than twelve lines...

SMITH, 46 Henson Road, March, Cambs., and Mr. J. R. CROSS, 6 King's Gardens, Peterborough Northants.

to radio sports com- mentators that enables them to see events as they took place in the past. A prize of £5 (which may be divided) is offered for an extract from such a...

ACROSS 1 You're in clover, like as not! (6) 4 The art of pilfering at the card-table? (8) 9 What Phyllis never fails to do (6). 10 'I would hate that death —my eyes,'...