I RA bombers succeeded in killing an old lady of 60 and an 18-year-old youth with a nail bomb left in a van outside Chelsea barracks and wounded 40 others. This was feared to...

Blackpool Revisited Ferdinand Mount 'I have been here before,' 1 said to myself, the first time nearly 20 years ago, sitting in front of my first plate of oysters at the great...

Blackpool H e sits upon the platform, on it but not of it. There is seldom any expression to be discerned passing across his face. He broods over the conference like a sullen...

Towards a commitment Auberon Waugh Some years ago I was told — although I have forgotten who told me, and so can't judge how much weight to give the information now — that...

Roger Cooper Anwar Sadat, hailed in the West as one of the greatest statesmen of the age, was buried last Saturday, and three days later his heir-apparent was predictably...

Andrew Brown Gothenburg Arbetet, an excellent Social Democratic paper, carried this week the story of 'the last officially licensed tramp in Sweden', who has written to the...

Sam White Paris Last week's devaluation of the franc in relation to the main currencies within the European monetary system, and inevitably to the US dollar, has brought the...

Richard West Colombo, Sri Lanka The visit here of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh was anticipated with pleasure — and not only by motorists who believed that the roads...

James Hughes-Onslow Athens This Sunday 6,890,000 Greeks aged 20 and over will be electing 300 members of their Parliament in Athens and 24 'Eurodeputies to represent them at...

The event of the week has been the arrest of Mr Parnell under the Coercion Act, technically on the charge of inciting to intimidation, but really, of course, on that of...

Christopher Booker One of the most moving documents in the Public Record Office is a little piece of paper on which is scrawled 'The world is a brothel and the people in it are...

Jo Grimond That the interest in party conferences is focused on internal quarrelling and fringe meetings is indicative of the state of politics in Britain. It is no good...

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Next week sees the second by-election to be held in Croydon North-West since the war. The last was in 1948 (the constituency was slightly different then, as...

Donald Gould In the popular mind (and perhaps, also, in the minds of a good many sophisticates like MPs, barristers, and judges) the 'patients' confined in our grim psychiatric...

Begging bowl Paul Johnson The last time the BBC got a rise was in November 1979, when Willie Whitelaw very generously gave the Corporation a licence fee of £34, without...

More control? Tony Rudd Some Conservative MPs were reported as having said that the reimposition of exchange control would not constitute a U-turn in policy. An observation...

Sir: As a disillusioned Swedish citizen, I am a happy reader of Andrew Brown's accurate and clear-sighted reports (e.g. 3 October). It is symptomatic of the political climate in...

Sir: Who is this strange Teutonic female that George Gale has conjured up, called LiIli Burlero (10 October)? The song is properly known as Lilliburlero', the title coming from...

Sir: Mr Richard West in his review of Barbara Greene's Too Late to Turn Back (3 October) is unfair to Liberia. It was not a Liberian who sued me for libel when I published...

Sir: In his letter (3 October) replying to my article 'The Chilean miracle' (19 September), Peter Urbach asks if there are any countries in which monetarism has worked without...

Sir: James Cameron's 'Trans-Arabia' review (3 October) indicates that he does not know his subject too well. He refers to the Islamic call in his penultimate paragraph as 'God...

Sir: James Cameron in his review of Among the Believers (3 October) writes: 'Never theless the reflection returns constantly to Naipaul, as it does to everyone who travels...

Sir: When is a traveller a gypsy? Christopher Howse of the Catholic Herald raised an interesting question in the disputed areas of race and culture in his letter last week. The...

Sir: The scores of prisoners 'done to death' in prisons by South Africa's security police must have felt the same fear, pain and horror as those prisoners murdered in the Gulag,...

Sir: John Stewart Collis in his excellent homage to George Orwell, 'Genius for description' (10 October), is quite right to point to Orwell's dibble trouble with Stalinism in...

Sir: I am writing a book about John Piper's topographical work in the British Isles and am anxious to contact owners of his pictures in this field, with a view to possible...

Strachey's Virgin Queen Michael Holroyd Lytton Strachey began his 'tussle with the Virgin Queen' on 17 December 1925, completing the first two pages of Elizabeth and Essex...

P. J. Kavanagh Diaries 1920-1922 Siegfried Sassoon ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Faber pp. 304, £9.95) Siegfried Sassoon, as these diaries show, finished up after the First World War...

Richard Cobb The Youth of Vichy France W. D. Halls (Clarendon Press pp. 492, /20) The Vichy period of French history has long exercised a sort of fascination to Anglo-Saxon...

Eric Christiansen An English Journey Richard West (Chatt( Windus pp.196, £8.50) Does it happen to every journalist, soone or later? After ten, or 20 or 30 years spell canning...

Missionaries A. N. Wilson The Mosquito Coast Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton pp. 392, £7.95) Being human is bad enough. But imagine how much worse it is to be American. This,...

Caroline Moorehead The Cat and the King Louis Auchincloss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp. 183, £6.50) The Christmas Tree Jennifer Johnston (Hamish Hamilton pp. 168, £6.50) The...

Sentiment, Italian style Peter Ackroyd Three Brothers ('A', Camden Plaza) Francesco Rosi's new film is one of those strange hybrids in which fantasy and reality are so mingled...

Black ties Alark Amory In the Mood (Hampstead) Caritas (Cottesloe) Village Wooing (New End) The programme yielded no clue as to time Or place, and when two men in RAF Uniform...

Grand tour Rodney Milnes The Marriage of Figaro (Kent Opera) Arabella (Covent Garden) Falstaff and A Midsummer Night's Dream (Glyndebourne Tour) We have grown so accustomed to...

Sculptural John McEwen Considering the degree to which civil violence intrudes on private life in England compared with a generation ago, it is rather surprising how...

Old Joe Taki Like Max Kelada, Joseph Desiree Dwek is an Englishman who was born under a bluer sky than is generally seen in England. Joe resembles Mr Know-All in more ways...

Unbearable Jeffrey Bernard My own personal and painful problems have recently been put firmly into the back seat of my mind by the extraordinary affair of the ghastly pandas,...