it's a doddle — I was sent here from Trafalgar Square.' A demonstration against the poll tax ended in a riot in central London in which shop windows were broken, their contents...

THERE is a fine but significant difference between a vexatious litigant and one who is prepared to pursue every legal avenue to achieve a just cause. Mr Marcus Binney, the...

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 01-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 242 0603 LABOUR'S 'DISPOSSESSED' S treet riots are as British as roast beef, and we...

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It takes more than a riot to put the class war back into Labour NOEL MALCOLM I n August 1981, six weeks after the outbreak of arson and looting in Toxteth, Mr Michael...

CHARLES MOORE L ast week, The Spectator competed against the New Statesman in the final of a Radio Four quiz programme called The Year in Question. This will be broadcast next...

Ian Buruma discusses how the Americans are divided on the Japanese Problem Tokyo IF MRS THATCHER reads German poet- ry, which, somehow, I doubt, one can imagine her reciting...

Murray Sayle on Australian sewage and politics Sydney IT WAS ten suntanned days ago, the last day of the Australian general election campaign. In Melbourne, as everywhere on...

This is the sixth in our Lent series on English spiritual writers. THE Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible have been for the best part of 400 years...

Michael Heath

William Cash tours the former prison which is about to open its doors to the public THE two-line entry in my 1989 East European guidebook was not encouraging: `Colditz is now...

Gavin Stamp finds his neighbours ignoring listed building laws THE price of conservation is eternal vigi- lance, at least to judge by my painful experience over the past year...

Of rats and men THE recent Gardner enquiry into the clusters of child sufferers from leukae- mia in the vicinity of nuclear establish- ments has presented the idea that radia-...

Richard West traces the shortcomings of Manchester's jail to the great utilitarian IT IS appropriate that the worst prison riot in British history should have occurred in...

One last chance to enter our Wine Competition! Once you have answered all twenty questions, send your answers to The Spectator Wine Competition, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N...

Sandra Barwick on the strange case of the Winchester Three A PLACARD outside the Gothic arched entry to the Law Courts on the Strand earlier this week read 'Justice for the...

A CORRESPONDENT of the Times says that a cuckoo was heard as early as on Thursday week in the neighbour- hood of Surbiton. Even if the cuckoo heard was a real cuckoo, and not a...

THOSE who cannot wait for the Fayed brothers to be hit by a thunderbolt — they were out in force on the Commons Trade and Industry Committees — turn their disappointment on the...

BROADWALK House is the City's newest office building, in a droopy arcaded style and bilious colour, near the down starting signal of Liverpool Street Station. It appears to be...

For sale: the billion-pound lampshades Mississippi gets away with it and CHRISTOPHER FILDES he governor of Mississippi can breathe more easily. His most tenacious creditor has...

ARMING himself with a Treasury brief, Peter Lilley, the Financial Secretary, came along to speak at the London gold market's dinner — pledging his Government to stamp out...

Sir: John Ware, the former Sun reporter who now works for the BBC, no doubt owes much of his skill and flair as a writer to his days with his old newspaper. No- where is this...

Sir: Together with my wife and two sons, I was in central London last Saturday even- ing. We were going to the theatre and were looking for a restaurant to have a meal...

Sir: It is with considerable disquiet that I read your 'poem', 'Penalty Kick for Park- ing on Yellow Line' (31 March). By its publication you have unjustifiably tarnished the...

Sir: Orwell may well have once said, as your excellent Timothy Garton Ash writes ('New faces for old', 17 March), that at 50 everyone has the face he deserves. But he was hardly...

Sir: Labour's spokesman Mr John Smith, according to Noel Malcolm's article on 'corporatism' (31 March), makes an ex- traordinary factual error when writing ab- out the Japanese...

body was, Rick Jones relates, flung into a pit beneath Tyburn gallows in January 1661. Oliver's daughter Mary Viscountess Fauconberg piously retrieved and took the headless...

took Nizametdin Akhmetov, the Bashkir poet who had spent 20 years in Soviet prisons, labour camps and psychiat- ric hospitals, round London. We came across tramps who were...

Sir: A few years ago I preceded Rick Jones (24 March) in re-hashing the story of Oliver Cromwell's head (and his body) for the voluntary helpers and marshals who answer...

Sir: Harold Braham is quite right (Letters, 31 March) to jeer at the illiteracy of my letter to you (about the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award) which read 'the judges . ....

Sir: Harry Phibbs' article 'Cardboard Vil- lage' (10 March), was both welcome and salutory, marred unfortunately by one major inaccuracy. He states: 'Anyone who is homeless can...

Ferdinand Mount THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY 1981-1985 edited by Lord Blake and C.S. Nicholls Oxford, f40, pp.518 P osterity, it seems, has taken to using a zoom...

Timothy Mo MOSCOW! MOSCOW! by Christopher Hope Heinemann, £13.95, pp. 191 N ovelists are suspiciously good at writ- ing travel books, and travel writers are similarly adept at...

From lecture rooms comes the schooled laughter of undergraduates still taught to deride those foolish enough to display an interest in how many brats Lady Macbeth had left to...

J. Enoch Powell MILL AND LIBERALISM by Maurice Cowling CUP, £27.50, £9.95, pp.215 M aurice Cowling has re-issued un- revised but with an enormous new intro- duction the work...

Patrick Trevor-Roper THE SCIENCE OF ART by Martin Kemp Yale, f45, pp. 408 T he marriage of Science and Art is a noble theme, and many a speculation about the physical basis of...

Piers Paul Read A GOOD GERMAN: ADAM VON TROTT ZU SOLZ by Giles MacDonough Quartet Books, £17.95, pp.368 A dam von Trott zu Solz was among those who conspired to kill Hitler...

Tife's a bitch and then you're dead,' it said The notice in the back of a hot-arse car. What soul-coward, wimp, wrote it, I wondered, Self-fancied macho man whose deep...

J. L. Carr THE POTTER'S FIELD by Ellis Peters Headline, £5.99, pp.309 W riters whose novels tell of some violent act, its investigation and expiation, need more than a fair...

Anita Brookner CHICAGO LOOP by Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp.183 P arker Jagoda is mad, very mad, not in any active stereotypical way, but because he is wearied by...

Lindsay Anderson SATYAJIT RAY, THE INNER EYE by Andrew Robinson Deutsch, £17.95, pp.412 efore David Lean started shooting A B Passage to India, he told an interviewer, 'I...

and the Western world Paul Bailey SELECTED LETTERS 1940-1977 by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli Weidenfeld & Nicolson, f29.95, pp.582 T his...

Is it like a carnival with spangles and balloons, Fancy-dress and comic masks and sun-drenched afternoons Without a cloud to spoil the blue perfection of the skies? `Well yes,...

badly wounded Peregrine Worsthorne NOT MANY DEAD by Nicholas Garland Hutchinson, £16.93, pp.299 T he heroes of this book are the au- thor's two sons who urged him not to write...

Exhibitions 1 Empty rooms Andrew Solomon D rama, anguish and rapture are the hallmarks of Mediterranean painting, whereas clarity of light and accuracy of depiction and...

The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (Olivier) Never the Sinner (Playhouse) Searching high and low Christopher Edwards T ony Harrison's boisterous and often ingenious piece of poetic...

Strapless (`15', Curzon West End) Ask no questions Hilary Mantel A young woman on a European holi- day meets an older man; she is alone, he is suave, cultured, enigmatic and...

L'elisir d'amore (Covent Garden) Maintaining standards Rodney Milnes T he Royal Opera's newly studied Mastersingers proved to be hideously time- ly: two days after the first...

William Nicholson 1872-1949 (Browse & Darby, till 21 April) E.Q. Nicholson (Michael Parkin, till 27 April) Transforming forces Giles Auty T his week, the artistic Nicholsons...

Relax and enjoy it Marcus Berkmann 0 ne of the strangest aspects of 'grown- up' pop music — that curious form that, unlike most chart pop, tends to rely on real instruments...

Housewives' choice Wendy Cope S witching on a little early for the Sun- day lunchtime news, I chanced on the end of Country File (BBC 1, 12.30 p.m.). The reporter (John...

The secret of my success Taki Athens h ishis is a painful confession to make, but as this is the last column I write for Charles Moore, I might as well come clean. I have been...

In good company Jeffrey Bernard I feel as though I have taken early retirement. I am up and about again but I have little desire to venture further afield than the butcher's...

Fooling around Zenga Longmore L ast Sunday, to my supreme annoyance, I was woken up by the harsh ring of the telephone. In a fog of sleepiness I picked up the receiver and...

SINCE my last offering we have had the very sad news of Jane Grigson's death. She was a kind and splendid person, and she was one of the greater cookery writers of the century....

Thin partitions Raymond Keene A journalistic acquaintance recently offered to me the rather unkind observa- tion that all top chess players are mad. Unarguably, some of the...

12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY COMPETITION c iuVAS REG AL l2 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY Clerihews Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1619 you were asked for clerihews, the last word...

Winners: Bill Anderson, London W6 (f20); Mrs J. Capper, Leaming- ton Spa; Mrs M. G. Porter, Rich- mond, Surrey.

You are invited to write a poem (maximum 16 lines) in which in each line there are words which are anagrams of each other (e.g. 'baker' and 'break', 'doing' and 'in God')....

953: Tongue-tied by Mass A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers English Dictionary — ring the word `Dictionary') for the...