The affair of Mr Denis Hills in Uganda should have given the Government and the Foreign Office pause to reflect on the question of the protection of British nationals in an...

We all change our minds: President !di Amin rang up a friend in Israel, LieutenantColonel Baruch Bar-Lev, to say that he was 'finished with terrorists' because they caused him a...

No laughing matter John Grigg Enoch Powell can be very witty when the mood takes him, and during the last stages of the Race Relations Bill he used wit as well as intellectual...

It might be supposed that Mrs Thatcher and her policies would commend themselves to the National Association for Freedom, with Whom she appears to have much in common. Not so in...

The silent generation Auberon Waugh On Friday night I went to the school concert of Kingston St Mary RC Primary School. The programme was rich and varied, including a sizeable...

George Gale New York One of the great things to understand about American democracy and probably about everybody else's is its infinite capacity for b . YPocrisy. Thus, a few...

David Dimbleby New York He is of course an enigma. We know everything about him and yet we know nothing. The easy smile, the cool eyes, the flashes of temper, the ambiguities,...

Prederick Forsyth As the tumult and the shouting over the Angolan fiasco dies away the moment seems apposite to give it a brief backward glance and attempt some cursory...

Andrew Lycett The hostility to French activities in Africa shown by delegates at the recent summit conference of the Organisation of African Unity was not just because of the...

Sam White Paris An enormous theological dispute has broken out in France over that sacrosanct symbol of Gaullism—France's independent nuclear deterrent. The dispute blew up...

Peter Kemp When, after six years of alternate hope, frustration, disillusion, riot, and civil commotion, Spain at last erupted into civil war in the middle of July 1936, I was...

Helena Cobban Beirut Ours was the first plane in from London after the airport reopened. We traced a wide circle out to sea, then back to the city reaching up to meet us, its...

Tom Winnifrith The recent proposals by the Schools Council to abolish 0 Level and CSE in favour of one common examination will cause a lot of heartsearching in schools. They...

Christopher Booker My old friend Bernard Levin was in his rather embarrassingly rhapsodic mood last week on the subject of a new musical entertainment organised by Ned Sherrin...

Peter Lilley For most of the last forty years the average student of economics in Britain or America has been shielded from any systematic critique of the Keynesian system. He...

Whither the mixed economy? Nicholas Davenport The really unacceptable face of capitalism is bad management—the failure to make a profit out of its use of resources. This is...

the question of mercenaries in ease, inadvertently, they added to the fury of Mr Agostinho Neto and his communist MPLA regime in Angola against the brave, dedicated and possibly...

Sir : If nothing else, the Israeli rescue operation in Uganda has put the spotlight on 'General' Idi Amin, perhaps the most gross and brutal tyrant in the world today. One may...

Sir : From the rantings and brayings of Edward Heath in recent weeks one deduces that he is still suffering from delusions of grandeur. Why, oh why, cannot he rest content in...

Death by infatuation Simon Raven John Galsworthy: A Biography Catherine Dupre (Collins £5.95) Let us be plain about one thing from the start: the principal character in this...

John Terraine The Shadow of the Winter Palace: The ND to Revolution 1825-1917 Edward Cr ankshaw (Macmillan £5.95) Vienna: The Image of a Culture in Decline Edward Crankshaw...

Phillip Knightley The Distant Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War edited by Philip Toynbee (Sidgwick and Jackson £5.50) It is forty years this month since the outbreak...

John Kenyon The Boyne Water Peter Berresford Ellis (Hamish Hamilton £5.95) The battle of the Boyne, on 1st July, 1690, sealed the fate of modern Ireland. It is, of Course,...

THE WISTONBERG LINE by Osbert Sitwell Box 702 ENTHUSIASM by Ronald Knox, 17 Purley Bury Avenue, Purley, Surrey BURGESS AND MACLEAN, Sacker & Warburg (1961 71. by Anthony Purdy...

Benny Green Each time a pile of new children's books accumulates on the shelf, I wonder if any of the items among them will stir long-buried recollections of something lovingly...

Nick Totton Season Songs Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber £2.40) A book by Ted Hughes is like a take-away Chinese meal: a colourful -mélange of surface excitements which leaves one...

I. A. Richards The intellect ()final; is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work. W. B. Yeats Who'd think he'd see so proud a Master blot His copy-book so...

Robin Hood to the rescue John Spurling When I set out on my tour of provincial theatres I expected to find that the chief problem was money. In one sense of course it is. If...

Promises ... John Bridcut Orl Friday, with the solemn D major chord Which opens Beethoven's Mass, the Proms begin their third season of the post-Glock era. During his time as...

The good life Kenneth Hurren The Pleasure of His Company (Phoenix) Emigres (National Theatre, Young Vic) Apropos Matthew Arnold's reckless division of all the civilised world...

Symbols John McEwen Impressionism is the most popular of all modern art movements, but in its own day it went out of fashion to Symbolism. The symbolist painters answered the...

Mighty Penn Ian Cameron It would of course be an unpardonable oversimplification to suggest that Lipstick (Empire, X certificate) is anti-rape and proMurder. For a start, we...

Bluff-calling Jeffrey Bernard Sensible Americans who must curse their bad luck at having won the War of Independence were given yet another reminder of how wonderful the...