So the first acute crisis to confront Mrs Thatcher's Government concerns not the economy, not defence, not even Ulster but whether 15 men may run around various grassy Patches...

The testament of Dr Marcuse Ferdinand Mount There's no place like a crowded British beach to hear that Herbert Marcuse is dead. How he would have hated the Wall's Cornett()...

Blackpool Having been brought up to believe that unity is one of the great virtues, alongside c leanliness, godliness, thrift and sobriety, I was a little stunned to realise...

Xan Smiley As the Zimbabwe political theatre company prepares to stage its umpteenth Mousetrap-like performance, a musty air of near-comic familiarity, a smell of mocking...

The Times' correspondent at Simla draws a depressing picture of AngloIndian morality. He declares that it is much more lax than that of England, and intimates that at Simla the...

Sam White Paris The third anniversary of Raymond Barre's Prime ministership has come and gone among such wailing and gnashing of teeth t hat it almost amounted to a period of...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington 'One should understand that members of the Royal Family, even remote cousins, have always been targets. The big differ ence now is that the IRA...

Richard West County Down In the Spectator this time last year, I sang the praises of the north Irish coast and in particular of two old-fashioned and friendly hotels in Antrim....

Robin Evelegh The central fact of Northern Ireland is the 'nationhood' of the Protestant people of Ulster. I do not know exactly how to define a 'nation' but, however one does...

John Healy This article by John Healy, a regular columnist, appeared in the Irish Times on 1 September, it provoked an angry letter from Mairin Lynch, the wife o fthe Prime...

Christopher Booker Looking back on the state of Britain over this past curious, unhappy decade, one thing may strike us more than anything else — the extraordinary state of the...

Sir: I will not answer, in detail the tissue of falsehoods about my negotiations with the Nigerian authorities contained in the letter written by Mr Makiwane and Mr Somdaka and...

Sir: Christopher Booker's suggestion for the restoration of the old counties (25 August) could not have come at a more auspicious moment. His advocacy of further discussion and...

Sir: In your last issue most of the editorial section is devoted to the latest IRA atrocities and the Irish problem: diagnosis aplenty, but little in the way of prescription....

Sir: The return of 'El Cordobes' to the bullring (Notebook 11 August) may have whetted the appetites of bloodthirsty crowds in Spain but it will not impress those who condemn...

better than being attacked by a Silly Immoderate — except, perhaps, being attacked by two. So when I discovered that I'd been attacked on the same day by Mr Wheatcroft in the...

The very fool of Love Michael Foot The Letters of William Hazlitt Edited by Herschel Moreland Sikes assisted by Willard Hallam Bonner & Gerald Lahey (Macmillan El 0) William...

Nicholas Bethell August 1939 Nicholas Fleming (Peter Davies £6.50) The second World war continues to inspire books of 'what would have happened if' historical school. It is...

Stephen Koss A Man of the Thirties At Rowse (Weldenfeld £7.95) Munich: The Price of Peace Telford Taylor (Hodder £13.95) The 1930s, if not quite so low and dishonest a decade...

Richard West From Our Special Correspondent: Victorian War Correspondents and their Campaigns (Robert Wilkinson-Latham (Hodder £8.95) The Irishman W. H. Russell who covered the...

Douglas Johnson British Society and the French Wars 1793-1815 Clive Emsley (Macmillan £8.95; 0.95) Throughout the winter of 1797 to 1798 Bonaparte's army was encamped on the...

Mary Furness Nancy Cunard Anne Chisholm (Sidgwick £8.50) Nancy Cunard was the volatile, energetic, wilful, notorious, selfish, ambitious (but for what she never seemed quite to...

Mirabel Cecil The English Country Cottage R. J. Brown (Hale £6.50). This book fairly rips the roses down from round cottage doors and tears up their crazy Paving paths. It is...

Benny Green Coming Through Slaughter Michael Ondaatje (Marion Boyars E4.95) The crimes against literature perpetrated in the cause of the jazz novel are so grisly that I...

Irony and detachment Rodney Milnes Eugene Onegin; The Golden Cockerel; The Turn of the Screw (Edinburgh International Festival) Kent Opera's new Traviata. at Edinburgh struck...

Horror-shock Ted Whitehead Allen (Odeon Leicester Square) 'Absolutely no one under the age of 18 will be admitted,' declares the poster for Alien (X). Which seems a pity,...

!von Hitchens John McEwen The death of Non Hitchens has deprived England of its senior artist of merit — he was 86 — and greatest contemporary landscape painter. More...

Paradise lost Taki Vouliagmeni This is the plushest resort in Greece. Ten miles east of Athens, it is a complex of bungalows, hotels, restaurants, swimming pools and marinas,...

Child bride Jeffrey Bernard 'Yet teenage marriages can last' (Radio Times 21 August 1979.) Horace let himself in with his latchkey, walked in to the hall and hung his satchel...

Philip Geoffrey Wheatcroft 'The people at the Guardian say that young people nowadays find obituaries boring.' I had asked Philip Hope-Wallace why he had not written anything...

Our man in Juan Raymond Keene As acting English delegate to the FIDE congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I found it illuminating to observe the brisk fashion with which the new...