The British argument is, in its first stage, perfectly simple. Whatever else happens, American tariff barriers should be lowered as soon as possible. If this paeans that...

The sudden decision at the Rome meeting of European Foreign Ministers last week that an acceptable compromise was possible on the proposed French protocols to the European...

The Treaty that was signed in Ankara last Saturday between Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia is the latest proof of the failure of Russian foreign policy and, as such, it deserves...

Even the citizens of Teheran themselves must have found it hard at times in the past week to make out who was on which side of the barricades and what all the fuss was about....

• It is a pity that there should have been any difference of opinion, still more that an actual . division was forced, on the Royal Titles Bill in the House of Commons on...

this week that his Government will shortly raise in the United Nations the question of Chinese Nationalist troops in North Burma. These forces, nominally commanded but perhaps...

The debate on prisons in the House of Commons on Monday was opportune. One of the chief indictments of the prison system as it stands is the total inadequacy of the...

T HE_ House of Commons has had a stiff examination in history this week. What was the date of the Bill of Rights ? When was the Act of Union passed and who were the rulers...

Last summer a number of Austin's employees at the Longbridge motor works were declared redundant and dis- missed, among them one Mr. John McHugh, a member of the National Union...

I T is said that Talleyrand, being told that the Czar Alexander would not be attending an impending international con- ference because he was dead, remarked " I wonder what the...

com- mercial television, I feel a little more competent to pronounce for or against that projected innovation. In America, of course, it is no innovation at all. What I saw,...

lay element in the projected Press Council I inferred that there was no such lay element in the General Medical Council (which, by a slip which no one seems to have noticed, I...

I T is universally agreed that the Crown should be kept out of politics. How much should it be kept out of commerce ? The question is prompted by a communication handed to, but...

was falsely identified as a participant in the hold-up at the ' Prospect of Whitby' public House at Wapping, and spent 20 days in custody in consequence. I have been re-reading...

paper is very interesting. Its nature has not been announced, and, I imagine, not yet decided. It is hardly likely to be on the lines of what are known as the weekly reviews;...

o'clock news last Saturday evening that the news bulletin would be followed by a party political broadcast, groans no doubt went up from a million homes where Saturday Night...

By ERNST FRIEDLAENDER . Hamburg. O N the tenth of March the draft of the statute of the European Community, will be submitted by the ad hoc (constitutional) Assembly at...

sy JACQUETTA HAWKES I HAVE just finished reading Period Piece, Mrs. Raverat's recollections of her Cambridge childhood. Discovering both that the book was charming and that I...

By ISABEL QUIGLY I HAD been in Florence three days, and the American sergeant had been there eighteen months. We had both arrived speaking no Italian; but, when we went round...

By C. L. JACQUES F ROM my seat at the back of the chancel I could see straight down to the high altar; on each side stalls were filled with the parish clergy of a whole diocese....

"To Carthage Then I Came. • • • " ByANTHONY THWAITE (Christ Church, Oxford) I FIRST saw the name on a tram in 'Tunis, a wild and giddy tram which lurched down the rue de Jules...

DEMOTION Caesar—said Hamlet—dead and turned to clay Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: And now the poet, mortified, must close Odd intervals between two walls of prose....

- THEATRE SOMETIMES, not often, there comes a new play to which the reviewer is sorely raempted to attach such stock epithets as clumsy, obscure, pretentious, but which,...

THE Mexican exhibition, after its secret vicissitudes, has arrived. It has been mounted at the Tate, as befits the biggest collection of its kind ever to cross the Atlantic,...

Damnation of Faust BEauoz's . Damnation of Faust was given by the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra' rchestra and Chorus at the Festival Hall on February 25th. Sir Malcolm Sargent...

One Summer of Happiness. (Curzon)—The Bad and the Beautiful. (Empire.)—The Titheld Thunderbolt (Leicester Square.) One Summer of Happiness is a Swedish film, a song of young...

Set by Joyce Johnson The usual prizes are offered for a soliloquy by any well-known statue in a public place. Limit fourteen lines of verse or hundred- and- fifty words of...

Report by M. H. Middleton Competitors were invited to compose an explanatory covering note to the managing director of Bubbli-Cola (Great Britain) Ltd., to accompany a...

In Search of Violence By J. P. W. MALLALIEU I N the early winter of 1932 I saw an ice-hockey match in New York. I had never seen ice-hockey before and had heard only that, in...

Learning to Spell. . SIR,-1 have been considering how I learnt to spell and how I spell now. I believe that my findings will be corroborated by other readers of your paper. I...

SIR,—May 1, with the diffidence of an amateur, suggest the possibility of another approach to the solution of the problem stated by the President of the British Society of...

root cause of the disproportionately high cost of almost the whole range of pharma- ceutical products ? Am I not right in believing that systematic spread of financial control...

I hope there need be nothing out of date about an attempt to weigh the evidence in any particular case dispassionately. If I believed it, I should have absolutely no reason at...

Sim,—The two letters attacking Janus for his outspoken criticism - of the - Bishop of Birmingham agree on one topic, that is, the courage of his convictions which the Bishop has...

Ideal Home Exhibition. (Olympia.) SLAP up the middle of the Grand Hall at Olympia, between the majestic pavilions of linoleums, wall-papers, cocktail cabinets, period...

SIR,—Mr. Desmond Henn, in your issue of January 30th. calls the Alberta Social Credit Government " a form of experimental Socialism." The fact is, as any Canadian Social...

SIR.—Your paper's rather sweeping criticism of the" furniture at the Earls Court exhibition does less than justice to the industry. While we admit that then is a great deal in...

SIR,—I would like to join issue with Mr. Martin Cooper when, at the commencement of his detailed and penetrating review of the recent concert-reading of Lennox Berkeley's...

Sut,—A part of my business involves me in the purchase of a con- siderable number of new books—mainly fiction it is true—during the course of a year. Decision to purchase is in...

Goats without horns were the subject of a conversation I overheard by accident. Until, that moment it had never entered my head that anyone would want to take the horns off old...

" Should never've asked his old lady to help at the threshin', an' things might have gone easier, but he likes help. Don't think he's havin' a real day unless the place is...

the exception of market-day, the town is quiet and leisurely. A tractor comes trundling in from one of the farms and goes snorting and echoing down the street to the garage, or...

Take chrysanthemum cuttings this month, remembering that the fround shoots are the ones that matter. Select shoots that are three inches high and cut .below soil level. Trim the...

IN the middle of the afternoon, when the sky was an even grey and seemed low over the rooftops, it began to rain, a gentle rain that was almost a mist. I looked up, and knew...

Memories. By Desmond MacCarthy. Forewords by Raymond Mortimer and Cyril Connolly. (MacGibbon and Kee. 16s.) " Hs had a rather beak-like nose and the look of an alert but seden-...

Tom Hughes IT is easy, though not very profitable, to mock at - the great Rugbeian and" muscular Christian " of the nineteenth century. Tom Hughes was immune from the...

Winston Churchill: The Era and the Man. By Virginia Cowles. (Hamish Hamilton. 18s.) No man while still alive, and not many men after death, have had as many biographers as Mr....

by Julian Franklyn; Professor Bonamy Dobree "Literature for an Age of Science" by Hyman Levy and Helen Spalding; and L. P. Kirwan "Blind White Fish in Persia" by Anthony Smith.

IN 1947 Colonel Spencer Chapman gave his first broadcast. It was upon The Enjoyment of Living Dangerously, and, having overcome his fear of the microphone (vividly described in...

M. MESNARD modestly describes his book as " merely an introduc- tion to the serious study of Pascal." It is the sort of introduction which could only have been written by a man...

The Early Victorian Woman. By Janet Dunbar. (Harrap. 15s.) WIUTING about Woman is one of those literary parlour-games which are all too easy for the moderately scholarly,...

new translation by Samuel Putnam. (Cassell. 2 vols. 63s.) THE new Don Quixote, which appeared about five years ago in America, is very finely produced and at a rather high...

As between whales and elephants, there seems to be no very clear reason why the former should have Moby Dick as their monument in our homes while the elephants are only...

IA Book Token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender of the first correct solution opened after noon on Tuesday week, March lOth. addressed Crossword, 99 Gower Street,...

OS TA R C Solution on March 20 The winner of Crossword No. 718 is: H. SHARPE, Esq., 112 Fawnbrake Avenue, Herne Hill, London, S.E.24.

we know that he got his revenge on Johnson for the epithet by writing the Doctor's life ; beyond that, and a few scattered references in the pages of Boswell, most of us do not...

hoped to be spared further biographies of Nazi leaders which are bound to involve the most tedious repetition of the history of the Third Reich. In some years' time there will...

ST. FRANCIS XAVIER (1506-1552), who is famous in Europe and throughout the East, but who is much less well-known in England, was a Basque gentleman and one of the first...

Magazine Post) Id.

ZONG IN-SoB's admirable collec- tion of Korean folk-tales and fables transports us to a world of ceremonious and cultured behaviour whose elegant, but heavy, etiquette is...

EVER since the publication of his fascinating study, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, discriminating people have real- ised .that in Donald Creighton the Univer- sity...

By Henry Suso. Trans- lated with an Introduction and Notes by James M. Clark. (Faber. 18s.) AMONG the mystics of the fourteenth century, Suso stands out for the poetry in his...

By CUSTOS THE long three weeks' account which ended on Tuesday belied Stock Exchange tradition by being active and firm almost throughout, notwithstanding the struggle for power...