Something like half a million students decided to boycott their lectures on Wednesday of this week. The nation will be none the worse off for that, and the incident might well...

The results of the French elections, given the political conditions obtaining in that politically unsophisticated nation, are as good as could be hoped for and are therefore...

It is not often that a politician's speech causes me a sharp pang of pleasure. Anyone who talks a lot with politicians in private knows perfectly well that what they say in...

Patrick Cosgrave The proposed new parliamentary building, designed not merely to give Members of Parliament reasonable elbow room in which to work, but also to provide such...

David Bleakley Edward Heath is the latest in a long line of British Prime Ministers who is beginning to realise that there are no easy answers to the problems of Ireland. The...

Rawle Knox Things have happened in Ireland since Westminster took over from Stormont, but nothing has fundamentally changed. During Telefis Eireann's biff-by-biff coverage of...

CURIOUSER AND CUR1OUSER grow the efforts of the Tory establishment to frustrate the doings of Enoch. Powell, and for every uncertain victory there is a definite defeat. We know,...

British television is the best in the world, they say. Oh, indeed; and why? Well, in America it's all advertising, and in Russia it's all Communism, and in West Germany and...

Auberon Waugh The Hothouse by the East River Muriel Spark (Macmillan £1.95) The Stockbroker, the Bitter Young Man and the Beautiful Girl Alfred Hayes (Gollancz £2.00) As I...

Nicholas Richardson A Window on Russia Edmund Wilson (Macmillan 0.50) Pushkin was still under thirty when Tolstoy was born, Pasternak already twenty when the old man died....

Christopher Hollis The Mint 352087 A/C Ross (Cape £3.50) Some people love publicity. Others shun it. In between there is a curious sector which protests against it and courts...

John Keegan Chief of Staff: The Diaries of LieutenantGeneral Sir Henry Pownall, Volume I, 1933-45 Edited by Brian Bond (Leo Cooper £6.50) Borodino, and the War of 1812...

The Hidden Navy Evelyn Berckman (Hamish Hamilton £3.00). For the social historian, the Public Record Office seems to be an inexhaustible fount. Evelyn Berckman provides what the...

Bookbuyer "Appointments and changes" as the Bookseller heads its weekly list, are fast and furious in the publishing world at present. On the first of May, John Bright-Holmes...

The dance has started. Critics and reviewers, censors and councillors, letterwriters, broadcasters, the prescriptive and the proscribing — all of them set in motion and prancing...

Kenneth Hurren In I-er play, Suzanna Andler, Marguerite Duras has, sensitively and understandingly, laid out for our inspection the emotions of a woman under extreme, if...

Clive Gammon In spite of its introductory Music to Have your First Coronary By, its portentousness, its occasional plonking fatuity (this week's jewel — "The Russian winter can...

Benny Green As we were marched into the broad, galleried room, sheepishly in step and mindful of our resemblance to the oddly-assorted victims of a South American firing squad,...

I am sorry that Gian Carlo Menotti is so distressed over an item in this column last month referring to an Anna Mahler sculpture in Spoleto (see a Letter to the Editor,...

Peter Quince " Without Contraries," as William Blake perceived, "is no progression." It is this deep law, no doubt, which accounts for the sense that something is mildly amiss...

Nicholas Davenport So the 10 per cent barrier has been broken. At the moment of Writing War Loan is yielding 10.3 per cent, and " Daltons " 10,4 per cent at 24. (How rightly...

With the Barclay Securities share price being dragged down by the bid from J. H. Vavasseur, it is scarcely surprising that opposition to the bid by small shareholders in...

John Bull I am glad to see that even in the current jittery state of the market that there are still opportunities available for the speculator. Two of my recent...

Nephew Wilde "Periods of uncertainty produce the most irrational behaviour," was one of my broker Wotherspool's more dogmatic statements of late. At the time I thought he was...

Industrial relations State-aided strikes Ralph Howell IN 1972, 23 million working days were lost — more than in any year since 1926, the year of the General Strike. Nobody...

Budgetary reflections custos The Chancellor was given rather a lot of stick over his announcement that pensions will be raised in the autumn by El for a single person and £1.60...

Bernard Dixon Fish are cold-blooded. Like most other nuggets of conventional wisdom, this statement is a half-truth. Many species of tuna and mackerel sharks have warm bodies....

Laing's return Sir: I fear that the rage which my article ' Laing returns to the fold ' provoked in Martin Williams (February 24) may have seriously interfered with his powers...

From the Rev Tony Crowe Sir: Mr Alder's letter justifying Israel's policies is a marked contrast to Mr Prittie's most reasonable letter. Paranoiac polemics devalue any...

From Dr Raphael Eban Sir: May I correct, for the record, two factual errors in Dr Schama's review of Abba Eban's My Country (March 10)? The accent is not " . . . in fact,...

It is somewhat unorthodox, not to say embarrassing, when a racing correspondent of my age and experience arrives at Cheltenham without a selection to her name. That, however,...

Sir: I was, to say the least, horrified by the malicious article that your ' Will Waspe ' penned against me which you have published in your paper on February 17. Its innuendoes...

Sir: A decade ago, I roomed next to three black Harvard freshmen. Al Capp's 'Blacks at Harvard ' piece reminded me of the real problems these guys faced at a time when...

Sir: It would be nice if the anonymous writer, who pronounced in 'A Spectator's Notebook' (February 17) that Gilbert Murray exercised fraudulent telepathy, had done his...

Sir: Benny Green hasn't necessarily caught Evelyn Waugh in an error in Scoop when he describes a game of ping pong in which the method of scoring was as in lawn tennis. When...

Sir: If Mr Auberon Waugh really thinks that either Wuthering Heights or The Brothers Karamazov would be a better novel without the dreams, he must be a bigger fool than I think...

Sir: I hope Mercurius Oxoniensis will accept the thanks of an undergraduate for his forthright statement of the events which have disturbed Oxford life this term. The Student...

Sir: Much of the blame for the current industrial unrest lies on the shoulders of the Prime Minister, who has clearly shown himself to be the enemy of ordinary,...