1960,' Kennedy was warned when the Chinese 'by unconventional means' brought down an American spyplane in Formosan clothing. To aggravate the rheum at the top of the Pentagon,...

M R. KHRUSHEELEV'S proposed peace treaty with the Ulbricht regime cannot have any bearing on Western rights—or duties. The question at issue is a different one. It is very...

By Our Common Market Correspondent T IILRE will be time when the tumult and shouting of the Premiers' Conference have died away to see just how much the Government proposes to...

From OARSIE CILLIE PARIS T HE first published work b} Charles de Gaulle. I recorded in the French Who's Who is a play in verse. Written when he was verY young, it is probably...

From SARAH GA1NHAM BONN T HEY are so old, both of them—de Gaulle has aged so startingly that he looks almost as old as the Chancellor, who is beginning to look like his own...

By JULIAN CRITCHLEY. MP M R. THORNEVCROFT returns on Sunday from a week's visit to the United States. While his talks with Mr. McNamara have ranged widely, the principal...

By OLIVER STEWART rr o strike a note of optimism about the future I of the British aircraft industry would be unfashionable. Yet last week's Farnborough dis- play was a...

'Guns not butter' Was the slogan of an earlier dictatorship. Castro has managed to eliminate the butter all right, but he can still only get the guns on tick from his masters....

velvet- clad youth who claimed with sobriety and elegance to be the rightful ruler of the United Kingdom and all lands thereto appertaining. Such an encounter was by no means...

T HE Commonwealth club may not be quite what it Was, but the new clubhouse is cer- tainly a big improvement on the old one. From a practical point of view Lancaster House was...

By GEORGE PATTERSON W I 'm Indian prestige and influence deteriorating along the Himalayan border China has launched a proposal for a 'Confedera- tion of Himalayan States'—to...

York, has been looking at the Wellingborough Festival, and these are his first impressions: 'Center 42's opening ceremonies were marvellously Anglican. Only Gussie Finkrtottle...

By ALFRED SHERMAN UT the Cuban peasants and workers must have been economically discontented, otherwise why should there have been a revolu- tion at all?'—insisted a...

SIR,-1 am surprised over a letter which I read in the Spectator of August 24 concerning Voluntary Service Overseas, and would like to point out one or two errors. I returned a...

h r `ck. It just isn't any good to argue, as he does, that :'Ccause it is impossible to draw the line between awhat counts as a human being and what counts as h c° mPlex of...

SIR,-1 suppose that one really ought to treat Mr. Henry Fairlie's mean little article with the contempt it deserves, but as one or two people other than him- self seem to have...

1 wrote to headquarters in London evera, month. Each of my letters was answered; these wen. not brief acknowledgements with a few general word, of encouragement but thoughtful...

from Mr. de la Bedoyere in which he says that to prevent the birth of a deformed baby 'is a spit in the face of Almighty God.' It is good that we should all be frequently...

R. M. Blom field British Voluntary - Service Lionel Melville, M. M. Elliott, David Stanton The Earl of Sandwich's Crew John Paul The Comnton Market R. Thompson The Last...

I wrote as amusing or disgusting. He has read letters to the VSO office expressing appreciation; I have read letters expressing disquiet. 1 do not doubt his sincerity in viewing...

Katharine Whitehorn and Sir Anthony Wagner are being rather unreasonable about the decision of some banks to discontinue the practice of specifying the names of payees on...

SIR.--At the foot of 'Portrait of the Week' in last Week's issue of the Spectator, it was written that Glasgow possessed 'the last of the nation's trams.' MaY I bring to your...

Sitt.-As a bank official I feel unable to let the article, 'Don't Bank On It,' by Katharine Whitehorn Pass without comment. I entirely agree that our banking system is still...

systems adopted by most banks would have overcome them all had they been aware of the services that are offered by the Bank of Valletta, 228 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC1,...

SIR,-The article by Leslie Adrian on 'Spare Parts' was of particular interest to me as I am on the fringe of the electrical business and for years have stood on my head to...

scarab on which Akhenaten's mother appears blue- eyed, he ought to disclose it to the learned world. If Akhenaten's mother was a Mitannian (which is a bare possibility, not a...

question of the wisdom or folly of the Government's application to enter the EEC one has been struck by the impression that the Government is bent on entering irrespective....

SIR, —I notice that I have let a misprint escape me in my review of Yevtushenko's Poems, entitled 'Another Part of the Planet.' I have stated that the new selection in Russian,...

Meccano Drama By BAMBER GASCOIGNE COMEDIANS' faces are often described as mobile; Frankie Howerd's advantage is that he has more than most to mobilise. Spare flesh seems to...

I, as a journalist, find my- self receiving sheets of PR 'news' by every post, nearly all of it related to a subject I long ago ceased to write about. There must be armies of...

Novelists' Cinema By ISABEL QLJIGLV shock oc c k o o n f v e t h n e t o w n h a o l le s e b n u s s e i business, verbal se f g ot y shockingness, there are few) is going to...

Contrasts By CLIVE BARNES IT would be difficult to think of two ballet companies more dissimilar in aims than Western Theatre Ballet and London's Festival Ballet. The first is...

Border Incident By CLIFFORD HANLEY A SMALL crack has appeared in the solidarity of the Inde- pendent Television contractors. Mr. John Burgess, chairman of Border TV has...

Surge and Thunder By WILLIAM GOLDING T OPENED Mr. Fitzgerald's new translation of the jOdyssey* with a foreboding which was not lifted when I saw that he had given each book a...

The Rothschilds, By Frederic Morton. (Secker and Warburg, 25s.) 'The East India Company,' Nathan [Roths- child] would reminisce at a dinner party near the end of his life, 'the...

The Northern Isles. Edited by F. T. Wainwright . (Nelson, 30s.) EACH of these three volumes is a welcome eari" tribution to the literature of the Highlands and Islands. Everyone...

Carlos the Bewitched. By John Nada. (Cape, 30s.) PROFESSIONAL historians rarely bother with the flesh of history: their concern is with the bone structure; the way it grows and...

The Battle of Arnhem. By Christopher Hibbert. (Batsford, 25s.) CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT Showed in The Destruc- tion of Lord Raglan that he has an eye for character and for the...

The Queens and the Hive. By Edith Sitwell. (Macmillan, 42s.) ICONS are not portraits. They are not intended, as portraits are, to be human. They are tinted images of beings held...

No ONE receives such undeserved obscurity as foreign writers who are not quite first-rate. Leskov is less subtle than Turgenev, less dramati c than Dostoicvsky, less...

DEAiti is a ticklish subject and part of the crime- writer's craft is to invest it with acceptable tone. generally sound convention has been estab- lished and where writers...

Pedigree. By Georges Simenon. Translated by Robert Baldick. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.) SIMENON is the proverbial horn of plenty dis- guised as the twentieth-century literary...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THE 'life' view of equities, seen through the eyes of the manager of life-assurance funds, has changed—and is, I fear, less rosy. The astonish- ing fact...

Olive Oily By ELIZABETH DAN ID MR. FLAX says that English customers don't like buying olive oil in any container other than a bottle; they want, Mr. Flax says, to see the...

S lit AMBROSE KEE\ IL, chairman of Fitch Lovell Ltd., opens his very full review of the et°111Pany's trading year ending April 28, 1962, y‘olY r eferring to the late president...

By CYRIL RAY AN incensed Highlander has written to tell me about a BEA flight last month from London to Aberdeen—an unexplained hour's delay in leaving; the connection from...