N OWHERE except in certain Republican circles in the United States can President Truman's dismissal of General MacArthur be received with anything but relief and admiration....

Since he has become Minister of External Affairs in Canada Mr. Lester Pearson has been conspicuous for the sanity and cogency of his public speeches. Nothing could have been...

Good news from Malaya has been scarce for a long time, and this makes all the more welcome this week's reports about the elections in Singapore. The authorities had some reason...

' it is unfortunate that the latest British proposals for settling the outstanding points in dispute with Egypt should have been debated in the Press and public of both...

Border incidents have a nasty habit of developing in a rather different way from that intended by their authors. Probably neither the Syrian nor the Israel Government is anxious...

The Persian Government's reply to the British Note on the oil position says rather brusquely what any Persian Government was obliged to say in the circumstances ; that the...

The s q ualid episode of the theft of the Coronation Stone would seem to be at an end. It only remains to identify definitely the stone left at Arbroath Abbey- on Wednesday. If...

Labour's Chancellor of the Exche q uer. Whatever opinions may be held about the refusal to cut Government expenditure or the increase in income tax and the tax on distributed...

The House of Commons seems to have been so amused at its own antics on Monday ni g ht, when an Opposition prayer to annul an order reducin g the weekly cheese ration from 3 oz....

T HE Chancellor of the Exchequer was very careful to stress, in both his speech in the Commons and his broad- cast to the nation, that his Budget could not be popular. This very...

from the United States at a London hotel. The lift-man, who knew him well, greeted him with, " Well, General, glad to see you again. But what are you Americans up to? Here...

read- ing. One that does year by year is that of Pest Control, which turns an honest penny or two for its shareholders by making life hard for insect pests the world over. In...

course. a foregone conclusion, but the increase in the Conservative majority was not. The fact that on a relatively small poll the Conservative vote dropped by 4,500 and the...

W ITH Sir Ernest Benn courting penal servitude through obduracy about his census form and the Housewives' League burning their ration-books somewhere in the vicinity of the...

between animals. I am grateful for them, but so far they have not carried the matter much further. One story is interesting. Some years ago, it seems, the B.B.C. broadcast the...

naturally turn to Lord's and Old Trafford and Bramall Lane and the rest. But it is an odd thing that till now, so I am told, no list of first-class and minor county fixtures has...

By SIR ALFRED ZIMMERN Springfield, Mass. M ANY people I have met here, great friends of Britain, are getting worried about the present uneasiness in British-American relations,...

By D. W. BROGAN I F we want to mark the contrast between the First and Second World Wars 'there are two technical devices that were entirely novel. One was the atomic bomb...

By GRAHAM WATSON HE book-trade is going through one of its periodic financial crises. On the face of it this would appear to be strange. The total annual turnover of the trade...

By DEREK HUDSON " For the great world's Exhibition, Let's shout with loud hum, All nations never can forget The glorious First of May?: Seldom, therefore, can the actual...

By BRIAN INGLIS Dublin M UCH can be learned about a country from the study of its scandals. They are not necessarily a source of embarrassment: few people in England would...

A Plan for a University PREVAILING east wind and a prosaically urban situation have always tended to discourage in Edinburgh Univer- sity any suggestion of academic...

I FEEL sorry for authors whose books appear at a moment when public attention is distracted by external events. Mr. Geoffrey Scott's Architecture of Humanism, for instance—a...

THE polite applause which greeted Frederick Ashton's Daphnis and Chloe at its premi&re last week suggested that the audience felt much the same as I did about this new work....

in one bill, is Shaw the dramatist in three brief bouts with Shaw the polymath ; and the compactness of the one-act form ensures, at least in two of them, that the dramatist...

THEATRE "Who Goes There!" By John Dighton. (Vaudeville.) I STRONGLY recommend this risible and charming comedy, whose author—he also wrote The Happiest Days of Our...

TAKING advantage of an uneventful week of concerts and with the Sadler's Wells production of Janacek's Katya Kabanova earmarked for next week, I will try and deal with my large...

MR. C. S. FORESTER'S Captain Horn blower, breathed into life by Mr. Gregory Peck, makes a sympathetic and attractive centrepiece for a picture devoted largely to the setting and...

SINCE they form the first proper exhibition of his work, the Samuel Scotts assembled by Messrs. Agnew are of great interest to the student. (Our principal veduta artist was...

The lilac tree (Edith Cavell, double white) which I recently operated upon seems to be showing no deterioration in her condition. Her buds are swelling as healthily as those of...

The bad weather has driven many sea-birds inland, and 1 have been watching with admiration the large conference taking place between al, flock of rooks and another of sea-gulls....

FOR casual observers the change of colour in the countryside comes when the first green leaves appear on the trees. But that is an elementary appreciation, like that of the...

CONTINUATION OF THE INCOME-TAX THE Income-tax is to be continued.. . . The House of Commons has affirmed the continuation by 278 to 230 ; a clear majority of eight over and...

Most people in the country at this time are alert, hoping to be the first to hear the cuckoo in their neighbourhood. Conversation tends in that direction, and I was asked the...

Set by Guy Kendall A prize of LS, which may he divided, is offered for a triolet on birds-nesting. Entries must be addressed to the Spectator, 99 Gower Street, London, W.C.1,...

Report by R. Kennard Davis A prize of .0 was offered for a conversation on their respective masters between Sam Weller and Jeeves. • The number of entries was disappointingly...

Six Years' Prayers SIR,—Mr. Watkins says he would not mind our praying now if only we had prayed since 1945. The short answer to him is that we did. I have not the statistical...

SIR, —May I offer some emendations to Mr. Vulliamy's letter on publishers and authors? It is true that publishers are not in the business entirely far the sake of their health,...

SIR,—Janus understates the case in his comment last week on the indepen- dent boarding schools: they are not only faring reasonably well," but they continue to enjoy a period of...

considerable import- ance—the future of the independent public schools. As he says, most schools have waiting-lists, and there is no need for immediate alarm. But the position...

SIR.—The author of your front page notes says, " Nehru is a man of great integrity." But that is precisely what he is not !—as the writer of the paragraph goes on very ably to...

SIR.—My attention has been drawn to a letter published in the Spectator of March 16th, under the heading " Hitler's Visitors." Sir Francis Fetherston-Godley, now resident in...

SIR, Writing of transport in London in " the glittering days of King Edward VII ". in Marginal Continent, Mr. Harold Nicolson remarks: " We did not foresee the time when the...

SIR, —Is not Lord Pethick-Lawrence's letter a little snobbish? He was friends with the railwayman, but the railwayman talked freely about polities, religion, books, class,...

the Society of Authors, which exists to help the struggling and frustrated, and the more successful as well in their battle to get published. •Full particulars can be had from...

Sit.—In the Spectator of March 16th, Mr. Philips Price gave an account of the oil royalties' relationship to the economic development plans in Persia. It was not, of course,...

Sire,—Mr. Wilson Harris, in his review of Miss Gould's Life of Christ, says: " Everyone hitherto has known that He spoke Aramaic, Hebrew having ceased to be a spoken language...

your correspondent " Author-in-Waiting." L 4ad a MS. on Nietzsche accepted for publication six years ago. A year ago I corrected the page proofs, but there is still no sign of...

SIR.—I n her article, The Sweet South, Marghanita Laski writes, .. ungraciously the English poets seem to have travelled only to yearn for England—Rupert Brooke in Berlin,...

and Mrs. Seaton's amusing comment thereon (Class in the Kitchen) in your issue of March 30th, surely the line of demarcation is that 'phich divides the tippers from the tipped....

FEW writers are better equipped to present . an up-to-date picture of South Africa's complex and ever-changing problems than Mrs. Millin, who in 1926 published a very readable...

A Poet's Life World Within World. By Stephen Spender. (Hamish Hamilton. z Ss.) LOOKING back on the poetry he wrote in the early 1930s, Mr. Stephen Spender says: " I was an...

London : The Northern Reaches. By Robert Colville. (Hale. t ss.) IT is a little melancholy to have to write of a book which is on balance definitely good that it might have...

Two Frenchmen: Pierre Laval and Charles de Gaulle. By David Thomson. (Cresset Press. i zs. 6d.) Tins is a most useful book to the general reader, for the raising of problems...

Seaside England. By Ruth Manning-Sanders. (Batsford. iss.) Ttie shades of the founders of the seaside cult—the medical men, Floyer, Wittie, Baynard, Russell, who, in the...

Being a Woman. By Amahel (liodlo Head. 7s. 6d.),, THE middle years of this century are producing a curious and as yet unnamed social phenomenon: a genuine feminist movement....

Beetle's Career. By Ronald Fraser. (Cape. 8s. 6d.) The Wonder That Would Be. By John Fisher. (Hodder and Stoughton. los. 6d.) RONALD FRASER'S Marriage in Heaven was one of the...

The Legislatures of Ceylon, 1928-1948. By S. Namasivayam. (Faber. 18s.) IN pursuit of colonial political advancement the British Government can draw upon Ceylon experience for...

worse post-mortem bores than golfers, as anyone knows who has is at Glenbrittle or Burnthwaite. Theirs Is a specialised agony or delight at which the non-initiate stares without...

was published in 1908, there has been no popular edition of the work of this poet. The two volumes edited by Mr. Edmund Blunden and Mr. Alan Porter in the 'twenties have long...

Business it would have been better named. There is nothing about enterprise in it. Its thesis is that the existing British Cornpany Law should be amended so as to impose upon...

[A Book Token for ono guinea will be awarded to the snider of the first correct solution of this week's crossword to be opened after noon on Tuesday week [ April 24th. Envelopes...

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By CUSTOS Tuts is a makeshift Budget, as it was bound to be. Faced by an inflation gap measured, as I see things, rather optimistically at only £170,000,000 Mr. Gaitskell has...