brought by Republicans against the Truman adminis- tration was that it had allowed the Com- munists to seize the initiative. This, like so many election charges, is now coming...

The Communist commanders in Korea have been informed that the United States Government agrees to the reopening of truce talks and suggests that prisoners refusing repatriation...

Immediately before he returned from London to Kenya, Mr. Blundell, leader of the European elected members, said that he and the Colonial Secretary were in complete agreement on...

President Peron would have -been well advised to take to heart the warning of another dictator—Stalin—who assured his disciples last autumn that the laws of economics are...

The news that Sir Ralph Stevenson and General Sir Brian Robertson have been appointed as the British representatives in the forthcoming negotiations with Egypt comes as a...

The calm detached voice of reason has struggle enough at the best of times to get through the crude clangour of South African politics, and in this most crucial of general...

A LMOST the whole of Mr. Butler's budget speech on Tuesday was delivered in strong natural light, which seemed to be a good omen. Outside the chamber there were evidently clouds...

The Viet-Minh incursion into Laos, though it seems to have been made in some strength, has not as yet led to any major engagement with French Union forces. Viet-Minh strategy...

Because the South Africans did so well in Australia, because the shock team of Lindwall and Miller is probably past its best and is not certainly fit, because Trueman scattered...

the past eight years is that of asking whether an easy Budget can possibly be a sound one. It is natural to apply this test to Mr. Butler's Budget for 1953-54, for, although it...

relations with Nutto, a female grey squirrel who has lived in my house since last autumn. When she first arrived she was quite small and lived in the nursery. " Just like a...

pleasures. " One of our group,'-' I heard Mr. Basil Davidson say, " counted_ only twenty-two house-flies in the Peking food market. There were no bluebottles at all." He was...

like a jet-assisted Phoenix from his ashes, is henceforth to contribute a weekly causerie to Time and Tide would appear to put me in something of a quandary. I know how staunch...

Colonel John Hunt and his party, the summit is likely to be reached some time towards the end of May or at the beginning of June. It is, I understand. just possible that, if the...

I FIND in moderately exalted circles a marked tendency to attribute the New Look in Russian policy to M. Malenkov's fear of the Red Army. Proponents of this theory argue, if I...

By D. R. GILLIE - Paris. All serious politics in France today are concerned with the problem of harnessing the old forces of national energy to some- thing larger than the...

attended a Liberal Press-conference before an election, and said that the duty of Liberals was to tell the people -the truth as they saw it. That was their duty and their whole...

By 3ACQUETTA HAWKES MONG us human beings a notion prevails that the subtle mechanisms science has given us of late have vastly enriched our existence. " Isn't it marvellous ? "...

By HALLAM TENNYSON T 4 a.m. while the central Indian plains are still relaxing from their struggle with the heat, a band of men and women break camp, roll their simple kit into...

ByRICHARD USBORNE I AM told that a wine, kept in however dark a cellar and however far from the country of its birth, will stretch and yawn and turn in its bottle every spring....

By J. S. FRIPP T HE hotel was in Oxford. (Most people knew the bar.) They were building a new wing there; and I was help- ing. It was no better and no worse than any of the...

The Interview By DAVID STONE (Queens' College, Cambridge) I PAID off the taxi at the corner of the street, and walked about two hundred yards to the offices of The Organisa-...

at the Festival Hall on April 8th bore the unmistakable imprint of its conductor's taste. In Schubert's sixth symphony Sir Thomas Beecham found a short cut linking the world of...

I Confess. (Warner.)—Peter Pan. (Leicester Square.)— Destination Gobi. (Metropole and New Victoria.) FOR many years Mr. Alfred Hitchcock has manufactured for our enjoyment...

ART Rodin. (Rowland, Browse and Delbahco.)---Twentleth Century Form. (Whitechapel.)—Mural Paintings. (R.I.B.A.) IN view of recent disturbances at the Tate, it is perhaps...

point is the play's essential pointlessness. A murder has been done, and in the first act the identity of the murderer is made known to the audience. We then sit back and...

"SPECTATOR" Please write :— THE CIRCULATION MANAGER, " Spectator," 99 Gower Street, London, W.C.1.

The Boy Friend. By Sandy Wilson. (Players' Theatre.) Gnus with cloche hats, low-slung waists and high-pitched voices, darting coy glances and squeaking in refined accents,...

Veneziana. (Covent Garden.)—Ballets Jooss. (Sadler's Wells.) I ALWAYS regard Andree Howard as a choreographer with two consistent qualities—clarity of intention and the...

The Sporting Films By J. P. W. MALLALIEU Y EARS ago I saw a racing film, You can tell it was years ago because the story turned on that new invention, the slow-motion camera,...

Although it grieves me to see the damage done by bird-nesters, I cannot help feeling a slight sympathy for the schoolboy who goes bird-nesting. Now, with the lengthening days...

ONE of the most extraordinary-accounts of animal behaviour I have even encountered comes to me from Miss Lucy Samman of North Ferriby in Yorkshire, and makes me wonder again...

Now and again, in the grounds of an estate or in the centre of a lawn of a large house, 1 have looked at the tree commonly called a mon- key puzzle tree, and its strange growth...

lay awake listening to it. For a time it was the only sound. and then an owl hooted in the trees across the road. Slowly the blackness above the trees dissolved into a grey...

bed. Three-year- old plants should be put in a bed previously trenched and manured and built up roughly nine inches above the general level of the sur- round;ng garden. Crowns...

Set by Joyce Johnson Readers are invited to submit an extract from a new anthropology written by ex-ornithologists. The index would include — the Crested Aristocrat, the...

Report by Lucilio Readers were invited to compose cat address by a postman to the much-bombed E II R pillar-box in . Edinburgh, or a lament by that unfortunate box to the...

SIR.—Readin g the Rt. Hon. Philip .Noel-Baker's persuasive article Budgeting for Peace in your issue of March 27th, I felt at first that the cuts in Unesco's budget were...

Boys in Coal-Mines SIR,—The fears expressed by your correspondent, the Reverend Michael Gedge, that there is still nothing to prevent a boy between the ages of sixteen and...

Sta,—The Soviet Government has just demonstrated in a most startling manner its desire to convince the world that Stalin's death has brought about a radical change in its...

Sta,—It has been stated that no one in his senses doubts that there is good realistic art as well as goOd . abstract art. Would it dot be more realistic to accept that all...

SIR,—I hope you will grant me - space, to express my warmest- _thanks to all the readers of the Spectator who have written to me in sympathetic and far too appreciative terms...

In '53, as you recall, they raised the Judges' pay Not by tax-free " expenses," but the regulation way. ach got five thousand more -a year—a thousand net, in brief; It came...

SIR, --If Mr. Kirkbride is going to allow every member of the liliaceae to be called a lily, we shall get into sad confusion; if an , agapanthus is to be called a lily, why not...

Magazine Post) Id.

SIR, —Your reviewer, J. M. Cohen, in his criticism (March 27th) of The Complete Poems of Lionel Johnson, edited by Idin Fletcher, shows as little sympathy as he does...

Sta,—I am sorry that Mr. Hare takes exception to my one adverse criticism, a minor one, of his excellent translation of Vigny's master- piece, but I must assert again that in...

Youth in Search of Security WHEN Yeats wrote " Thin g s fall apart, the centre cannot hold," he was expressing a feelin g that had already been prevalent in Europe for many...

THIS assembly of Sir Osbert Sitwell's short stories by no means con- tains the whole of his output in this kind. I miss the military cram- min g establishment and other deli g...

FREDERICK MARRYAT first went to sea at the age of fourteen in 1806. To have missed the last great action between sailing ships by a twelve- month must have been one of his chief...

ANYONE believing that England just before the First World War was a highly civilised society, from whose gracious and gentle standards our own age has sadly declined, will find...

(Rockliff. 25s.) THE withering contempt with which serious contemporary musicians in France wrote and spoke of the operetta and "light" opera must have astonished many English...

The Weald. By S. W. Wooldridge and Frederick Goldring. (Collins. 25s.) No region of Southern England is more greatly loved than that which occupies the major part of the...

Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain. By Basil Gray. (Faber. 30s.) MR. GRAY'S book is the latest addition to a growing list of Faber monographs on pottery and porcelain, of which...

"Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559 - 1581" by J. E. Neale; Max Beloff the third and last volume of "The Bolshevik Revolution" by E. H. Carr; and E. T. Williams "The Concept...

Casino Royale. By Ian Fleming. (Cape. 10s. 6d.) Maharajah. By Richard Cargoe. (Heinemann. 12s. 6d.) FIVE first books and a somewhat too practised sixth. What an impersonally...

Thus is an age of epitomes and digests; a Hellenistic age of vast, and sometimes ill- directed, erudition. It would be less than just, however, to write off Dr. Sarton as a...

IA Book Token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender of the first correct solution °Petted after noon on Tuesday week, April 28th, addressed Crossword. 99 Gower Street....

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By CUSTOS FIRST impressions of the Budget in the City were favourable. The benefits, are meant to evoke enterprise ; and if they prove effective, there may be more rewards to...