0 NLY the most disgruntled killjoy will grudge the House of Lords its moment of triumph. For the back- woodsmen nothing was lacking. There was a fine rabble-rousing speech by...

T HE end of another Commonwealth Conference has not brought with it the announcement of any very startling decisions, but what was achieved was rather better than tfie...

No. 6681 FRIDAY, JULY 13, 1956 PRICE 9d.

BY JENNY NASMYTH W R1TERS have most of the vices contingent upon talent. They are vain, temperamental, anarchistic, and petty. It has not been easy to accommodate 760 of them in...

MISS FRY won by playing mostly defensive tennis.—Sunday Express. MISS FRY attacks her way to title.—Observer.

rr HE big news of the week from abroad comes from the US, where Senator Knowland has announced President Eisenhower's intention to run again, the party conven- tion permitting....

BY CHARLES CURRAN W ITH its new policy document, Towards Equality, the Socialist Party moves away from Marx and starts replacing him by Freud. For this is essentially an essay...

BY RANDOLPH S. CHURCHILL My master comes like any Turk. And bangs me most severely. W Ho is controlling British foreign policy? No one imagines that the Foreign Secretary, Mr....

Lang case may yet turn out to have been the last straw on the patient back of public opinion. I may be over-optimistic, but I have the feeling that the 'campaign for the...

to say about the possibility of an innocent man being hanged : 'I do not believe . . . that within living memory a mistake has been made. It is possible that, after an...

as closing the correspondence (what he thought he was doing publishing Mr. Eliot's letter in that case is not stated). Are not all these frenzied objections a little idiotic...

few months ago both John Irwin and John Metcalf referred enthusiastically to The investigator, a radio play about McCarthyism originally broadcast in Canada, and later...

HARD ON THE HEELS of Mr. Roscoe Drummond's exposition in the New York Herald Tribune of the 'minority forecast'— namely that Mr. Eisenhower would not run simply because he would...

BY LORD HAILSHAM 0 NE of the nastiest political rows it has ever been my fortune to hear took place at the British Embassy at Washington in, I think, January, 1947. The partici-...

BY STEPHEN SPENDER I T so happened that I was in Vienna in mid-July, 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out. One of my friends was a leader of the underground socialist...

BY CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS ceremonial heads of the State and therefore should show them- selves to their people on ceremonial occasions and occasions of public interest. They should...

BY JOHN BETJEMAN T HE President of the Royal Academy was asked on the wireless recently which he thought was the most beauti- ful village in England. He said Ashwell, Herts, and...

with the author by live speakers on a BBC programme called 'The Travellers.' Next Sunday this programme is in its turn to be discussed by the Critics. I shall not, therefore, be...

Sr ,—,Writing about the Casement Diaries under the heading 'Shady Secrets?' (June IS) Mr. Robert Blake says: 'The most plausible explanation is that at some time in the past the...

SIR,—! Will give Mr. Harold Drown a pound for every living AngliCan Bishop who holds Latimer's opinions if he will give me a penny for every Roman Catholic Bishop who holds...

SIR,—Mr. John Borrow's article on the battle of the Somme is admirable in its description of that grim holocaust, but is materially wrong in its conclusion. The tank emerged in...

Euston 3221

'A Coward's Way' Graham Greene A Poet of the Counter-Reformation Evelyn Waugh Gwaun-cae-Gurwen Noel Gee The Casement Diaries Sean Brady The Year of the Somme A. R. Clough Names...

your correspon- dent has been underground in the anthracite section of the South Wales coalfield, but cer- tainly he would not find at East and Steer the conditions he describes...

THERE arc times when television makes a newspaperman feel that his craft is becoming redundant. In Panorama last Monday Mr, Chataway interviewed several men who had lost their...

English Opera WrrH philistine taxpayers firing on it from one side, philistine and snobbish voice-fanciers from another, and our greatest conductor from a third, Covent Garden...

SIR,—John Betjeman's note on names and places in the Spectator of June 22 recalls the comment of, I think, the New Yorker on the appointment of a new Governor of Eastern Samoa...

VORTICISM provided the one considerable demonstration in the modern history of English art, and Wyndham Lewis has been the one deliberately combative figure of significance. The...

REACH FOR THE SKY. (Odeon, Leicester Square.) -LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER. (Curzon) -THE LITTLEST OUTLAW. (Odeon, Totten- ham Court Road.) THE subject, not the direction, is the...

BY KINGSLEY AMIS T HE dilemma of the novel, the predicament of modern poetry, the quandary of the artist, the crisis of our culture—these topics have become as much a part of...

THE FOUNDATION OF INDIA'S FOREIGN POLICY. Vol. 1: 1,6O-1882. By Dr. Bisheshwar Prasad. (Longmans, 25s.) THERE is a widely prevalent idea that India's foreign policy is something...

WE are so accustomed nowadays to thinking of individuals as subordinated to the society of which they form a part that we easily fail to notice that some of the imaginary...

Fashion Between 1901 and 1917. By Frank Swin- nerton. (Hutchinson, 18s.) MR. SWINNERTON has an immense capacity for enjoying life and for remembering it in all its detail. He is...

REPORT ON THE VATICAN. By Bernard Wall. (Weidenfeld and N icolson, 21s.) Tim Vatican, whether or not one accepts its claim of indestruc- tibility and infallibility, is the most...

IN a neat backhander of an introduction, John Huston recalls that while Moby Dick was being filmed in the Canary Islands, Charles Hamblett (there to write a book about it) was...

THE author of this book and myself happen to belong to the same London club, and when I asked the hall-porter the other day if he had seen him lately, he replied briefly : 'No,...

LITERARY ESSAYS. By David Daiches. (Oliver and Boyd, Ms.) THE decisive word for Dr. Daiches's cast of mind as a critic is one of his own favourites—`postlapsarian.' It is wrong...

How drab can life become? The life of an elementary school teacher in a slum near Manchester might be expected to plumb the depth of drabness pretty thoroughly; and Dorothy...

EXTRACTS from Abroad on the Cheap. by Wendy Hall (Faber and Faber, 10s. 6d.), were chosen for this year's Spectator travel supple- ment; it is the best little guide of its kind...

ON the special position of the Treasury, and on its relations with other Government depart- ments, Professor Samuel H. Beer makes some interesting points in his brief essay,...

IN 1891, at the age of twenty-two, George Robey, hitherto a civil engineer, appeared at the Oxford Music Hall in London. Thence- forward he was utterly successful in whatever...

PERE DE LUBAC is a French Jesuit of great learning and spirituality who has done much in the past to reawaken Roman Catholics to belief in the Church as the mystical body of...

MR. CYRIL HUGHES HARTMANN is an accom- plished biographer. In The Enchanting Bellamy (Heinemann, 25s.) he writes with charm, sym- pathy and sense, and no one could have done...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THE troubles in the Standard and British Motor Corporation works have naturally caused many people to ask whether this is not the start of another depression....

BY CUSTOS INTEREST on the Stock Exchange shifted thiS week to the gilt-edged market on the announcement of the Treasury's final plan to deal with the maturing £824 million of 21...

and finally put in a permanent place during next month. If the original plants are not of the top quality and healthy, the labour is likely to be wasted, and it is as well to...

Jackdaws are not exactly my favourite bird (one must live with birds to know them, and we know the black ones!) and I can understand farmers getting incensed about them to the...

BY IAN NIALL IT is raining at the moment and, as usual, I can .hear, through the open door of my room, the steady beat of the downpour on the sky- light. There is something...

'We took a pair of otters last week,' the Fishery Superintendent told me when I visited him a day or two ago. These otters were not, however, the whiskered and playful sort, but...

BY PHILIDOR No. 58. Specially contributed by C. MANSFIELD 1 . K x Kt eh; One of the great figures in chess—both as a player and as a personality—in this century was Dr....

A prize of six guineas was offered for three common sayings altered slightly in wording, but considerably in meaning. 'TAKE care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of...

When Dryden wrote the comedy Mar- riage a la Mode, the theme of the plot was revealed in the first lines of the lyric with which the play opens: Why should a foolish marriage...

ACROSS 1 Heigh-ho, the sheep . coming back got the wine (7). 5 'Where essential silence cheers and (R.L.S.) (7). 9 Halt a non-existent land (5). 10 A rebel in collision with...