A gainst the advice of shop stewards, a majority of British Leyland's 58,000 car workers voted to end their strike and accept a 3.8 per cent increase in basic rates. They were...

The mantle of Macleod Ferdinand Mount Modes mostly think that politics, like the I art of biography, is about chaps. Talk about politics as if it offered alternative maps of...

D earBron,' I wrote in a letter a few weeks ago, 'This is just to let you know that we are producing our 8,000th issue next month. It is the issue dated 7 November, for which...

The magic number Auberon Waugh I t is not often that I receive instructions from the editor of this magazine about my subject for the week. In fact, I think it is the first...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington H ospital administrators across the country recently received a request from the Pentagon, asking them to set aside 50,000 beds for combat...

Andrew Brown Gothenburg T hey cannot have had an enjoyable time in the cold, dank darkness, waiting on a rock while their captain was interrogated. The gale that threatened to...

J ohn May Harris, a boy only eight years old, has lost his life, at Poplar, from having been compelled to administer to the brutal amusement of a mob. A number of boys had been...

Richard West Hong Kong rr he colony of Hong Kong, whose social life was condemned by Ken Livingstone as a 'rat race' (see last week's Spectator), also lives by a different moral...

had a sort of manifesto last Wednesday declaring the truly Liberal character of the Tory party. The Tories, it says, are all Liberals now, and the Liberals are mere...

Gavin Stamp Johannesburg J ohannesburg can never have been a beautiful city; it is certainly not beautiful now. Founded as a gold-mining camp in 1886, it has always been...

is said, accepted a Bill which is expected to suppress polygamy within the territory of Utah. It not only makes it a penal offence, but compels the evidence of husband and wife,...

Roger Warner Bangkok T raditional warfare in South East Asia follows a pattern. Among the many ethnic groups spread over the landscape, at least one group at any given time...

T he Russian revolutionaries have begun to fulfil their threat of carrying on their 'war' with the dynasty with the bullet, the knife, and the handgrenade filled with lyddite....

is Sheffield for?' 20 years ago you would have had an answer back pat enough. It might not have pleased you, but it would have been given with a convincing assurance. Sheffield...

Roy Kerridge B etween 1954 and 1958 I attended Holloway School in North London. It had been a boys' grammar school when I started and was a comprehensive school by the time I...

Donald Gould T he butter mountain must be threatening to engulf the dairymen. How else can anyone explain, in these hard times, the Butter Information Council's vast...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft J ournalists and backbench members of Parliament are bit-part players in the public drama. But they are sometimes more interesting — and more attractive —...

A ll the reports from Russia at the end of her second year of war show how the grim determination which marked the earlier phases has been succeeded by a firm confidence in her...

Alan Watkins rr he sixth form library provided the Spec]. tator and the Times Literary Supplement. Neither, 30 years ago, was to my taste. The TLS I found unreadable and mostly...

Peregrine Worsthorne T hroughout most of history it has been 1 the function of the Press to expose evil in high places. Editors have seen their function as that of tearing away...

T he plaudits which greeted the two Soviet astronauts on their return from their simultaneous voyage in space are well deserved. Russia's technological and scientific...

Surviving Paul Johnson A nyone inspecting the health of the British national press at the end of 1981 can produce two completely differeat sets of arguments. The first is that...

Stags at risk Tony Rudd T hose who apply themselves and their funds to the business of making money out of short-term dealing in new issues have traditionally been called...

Sir: No single spectator could produce a satisfactory report of a demonstration as large as the one organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament on 25 October, but I must...

Sir: Alexander Chancellor should come down off his Kentish mountain and make a trip to the Calais he maligns (Notebook, 31 October). Were he a yachtsman, he would find there a...

Sir: Murray Sayle misattributes, as well as perpetrating the common misquotation of, the celebrated phrase 'de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace' (24...

Sir: It is distressing that an entire issue of the Spectator should have been allowed to pass without due tribute to Geoffrey Wheatcroft's brilliant acronym, SODPAL, for the...

Sir: It would be pleasant to be able to mention Ireland in your paper, or any other, without attracting a nonsensical reply. To refute my suggestion that `Lilliburlero', as the...

tune' Lilliburlero', Lord Macaulay in his Vol. 2 of The History of England refers in . a footnote thus: 'The song of Lilliburlero among the State Poems. In Percy's Relics the...

Solitary travel in antique lands William Shawcross Slow Boats to China Gavin Young (Hutchinson pp. 489, £8.95) I have before me a gaudy travel brochure from a firm called...

Patrick Marn ham Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro A.J. Langguth (Hamish Hamilton pp. 366 £12.50) N o one before has attempted a life of Saki. His older sister, Ethel,...

Jonathan Guinness The Silver Salver: The Story of the Guinness Family Frederick Mullally (Granada pp. 255, £9.95) T he Guinness family really is a family. Everyone called...

Caroline Moorehead Flaws in Glass: A self-portait Patrick White (Jonathan Cape pp. 257, £7.95) M any successful Australians have been obsessed with the idea of escape and...

Richard In grams Places: An Anthology of Britain ed. Ronald Blythe (Oxford University Press pp.238, £7.95) rT 1 his book, written by a clutch of well ]. known authors chosen by...

Patrick Skene Catling The Complete Clerihews of E. Clerihew Bentley introd. Gavin Ewart (Oxford University Press pp. 145, £5.95) E. C. Bentley Was not only quite superior...

Francis King Customs Lisa Zeidner (Cape pp.272, £6.95) in this first novel by a 26-year-old Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, reality is layered with fantasy like a...

When I'm far out in drink, your musical box Gives me the horrors. Mermaids on the rocks, Beached rabbits, stranded starfish, teddy bears — Simpering pyknic picnickers in pairs —...

James Lasdun Feelings Have Changed P. H. Newby (Faber pp. 266, £6.95) A Separate Development Christopher Hope (Routledge & Kegan Paul pp. 199, £6.95) L'eelings Have Changed...

John Wilton The House of Sa'ud David Holden and Richard Johns (Sidgwick and Jackson pp. 569, £9.95) The Kingdom Robert Lacey (Hutchinson pp. 631, £9.95) Ibn Khaldun, as...

Homage to Catalonia Simon Courtauld Homage to Catalonia George Orwell (Penguin Books pp. 247, £1.50) w hen Fredric Warburg agreed to publish George Orwell's account of his...

Rupert Brooke, His Life and His Legend John Lehmann (Quartet pp. 178, £2.95). Brooke's romantic view of modern warfare wa s discredited by the carnage that took place after his...

Miller's tale retold Mark Amory All My Sons (Wyndhams) Decadence (Arts) E veryone enjoys the curtain going up at the theatre, but we are rarely allowed to watch one nowadays...

Man of irony John McEwen Elewwill begrudge Patrick Caulfield the honour of his current retrospective of paintings at the Tate Gallery (till 3 January 1982). He entered the...

A light touch Peter Ackroyd Paternity ('AA', selected cinemas) rr here were about eight of us altogether in the audience, like a small gathering around a grave. It was a large...

Side-step Alan Gibson T hat the Indian tour is on, after all, is a matter for satisfaction, at least to most English and Indian cricketers. It will not please West Indians and...

Hogwash Richard In grams T see that I have been taken to task, in the 1 friendliest possible way of course, by Mr Auberon Waugh over my disparaging reference to the naked bums...

Starry eyed Tab M y reaction upon reading that my Lowlife colleague was given a shiner by two taxi drivers of the Indian persuasion was that I could have told him so. Taki's...

Marked man Jeffrey Bernard w here was I? Yes, after the pounding from the the Indian mini-cab drivers in Gerrard Street I decided to cross the road into Shaftesbury Avenue and...