has, this time, budgeted for a rise of 4 per cent in mtports and of less than 1 Per cent in imports in 1969. This is quite ambitious enough. Indeed, considering that over the...

In the face of poor trade figures for March, Mr Jenkins introduced a Budget estimated to . raise *an additional f340 million revenue in a full year. Selective employment tax was...

Vietnam has been a battleground for twenty- four years, almost without interruption, and the casualties of the United States forces alone now exceed those of the us in the -...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH Politically the Budget must be judged by its electoral significance and by the effect it is likely to have on party morale. On the whole,...

AFTER THE BUDGET HARRY G. JOHNSON Harry Johnson is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Like other Chancellors of the Exchequer be- fore him, but perhaps...

AMERICA WILLIAM JANEWAY Washington — Congress is alive and well and living in Washington. The significance of Con- gress's re-emergence as a crucial political power centre lies...

GREECE HELEN VLACHOS Next Monday 21 April will mark the Greek junta's second anniversary in power. It is a year for anniversaries. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on 4...

CRICKET CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS I have written before in the SPECTATOR, and long before this present d'Oliveira trouble, that the difficulty about the management of cricket was that...

• CZECHOSLOVAKIA A CORRESPONDENT The author of this article, a Czech national u•ho has recently returned from a visit to his country, wishes to remain anonymous. In recent...

J. W. M. THOMPSON There begins to be something almost uncanny about the manner in which nothing goes right with our Caribbean adventure. The lesson that good intentions are not...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS The King last summer just saved his place By winning the trick when he played the ace; And seeing de Gaulle had saved his bacon Because of the pains that his...

PERSONA COLUMN ROLAND GANT In July 1967 John Rowan Wilson, in his 'Medicine' column in the 'Spectator,' described the hospital experiences of a London publisher injured in a...

SCIENCE PETER J. SMITH Suddenly genes are news, though odious news to some it would appear. Lord Snow was quite in order to wonder publicly why Jewish achievement is...

CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN My plane touched down on the Palisadoes tarmac in mid-afternoon to the strains of 'Tek mi to Jamaica where di rum come from,' played by the...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD If there is a lesson to be drawn from Big Breadwinner Hog and the ITA apology it has produced, it is, I imagine, that programme- makers must remember...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY Coming back from the Grand National a fort- night or so ago I was thinking what a fool I am. For what's the point of going out on a limb, as I did? Had I...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN I found Mr Short's outburst in addressing the National Union of Teachers both interesting and hopeful. Mr Short has already signalised himself by...

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER Most people sense today that we have entered on some kind of phase of transition, moving away from the social, political and psycholo- gical climate which...

PETER FLEMING Wavell : Supreme Commander John Connell, completed And edited by Michael Roberts (Collins 45s) I do not know whether there is a collector's market in official...

JOHN BETJEMAN Seventh Child Amy Barlow (Duckworth 30s) This is an unaffected and direct book. It is the autobiography of a schoolmistress: 'We were a large family and my father...

PETER FORSTER Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel Lawrence Durrell edited by Alan G. Thomas (Faber 50s) The deification of Durrell, a jolly if minor cult, is well...

(ouP 115s) Blood brothers C. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON In this impressive volume of 566 pages, Mr W. Blythe, a Chinese scholar and a former Colonial Secretary of Singapore, has...

ANTHONY BURGESS The British Folklorists : A History Richard M. Dorson (Routledge and Kegan Paul 84s) Peasant Customs and Savage Myths Richard M. Dorson (Routledge and Kegan...

TONY TANNER Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth (Cape 30s) At the end of one of Roth's early short stories ('The Conversion of the Jews'), Ozzie Freed- man stands on the roof of a...

ANGUS MAUDE The sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth produced in England what was probably proportionately the greatest and most intense investment in...

Master & minnows HENRY TUBE A Man's Blessing Leonardo Sciascia translated by Adrienne Foulke (Cape 25s) The Pursuit of Happiness Thomas Rogers (Bodley Head 25s) The Feast of...

J. ENOCH POWELL, MP The Origins of Socialism George Lichtheim (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 50s) The content of this book is much more limited than the title suggests. It is...

ROBERT SKIDELSKY 'In the long run,' declared Keynes, 'we are all dead.' This is the most telling condemnation of political utopianism I know. How often has one come across some...

RODNEY ACKLAND The tape-recorder has now proved itself to stand in the same relation to the art of the novel as the camera to that of painting. And all the time that the boys...

PATRICK ANDERSON Miss Weeton's Journal of a Governess edited by Edward Hall with a new introduction by J. J. Bayley (David and Charles Reprints 2 Volumes 105s) In May 1834, a...

ROY STRONG As a child my g reat love was my Pollock toy theatre. Admittedly, I got over-ambitious later in my Oliver Messel transparent g auze period with endless...

ART BRYAN ROBERTSON A fine group of brownish and sombre `veil' paintings by Morris Louis, the American artist who died in his forties, graces the Waddington Gallery; Howard...

PENELOPE HOUSTON It may seem churlish to praise a film One admires not so much for what it gets right as for what it manages to avoid getting wrong. But Oh! What a Lovely War...

Worlds away HILARY SPURLING Berenice (Theatre de la Cite at the Aldwych) The Giveaway (Garlick) Mixed Doubles (Comedy) Peter Daubeny's sixth World Theatre Season opened this...

DESIGN STEPHEN GARDINER If you go to Oxford from London, particularly when the sun is shining, you must take the M40. The last stretch of the High Wycombe by-pass has been...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Someone remarked that it was after all a humane Budget. It was not a phrase that occurred to me but I suppose it could be argued that as Mr Jenkins had...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL The Budget has left some bruises on my two portfolios. Every company in my list is affected by the two-and-a-half-point rise in cor- poration tax to 45 per...

CUSTOS Much the most important Budget measure for stock markets is the exemption of gilt-edged securities from capital gains tax. The result is that the low coupon stocks,...

LETTERS From Professor Scott M. Cutlip, Cedric Foster. George Edinger, Max Nottingham, Sir Denis Brogan, Geoffrey Birch, Charlton Mackrell, Tibor Szarnuely. Eric W. White,...

about God being a Tory is correct, might I suggest that Christ was not 'sent,' he left home because -of parental in- ccmpatibility.

work for many years. In his comment (4 April) on the late General Eisenhower he has done what no American writer could have done. Here in America we will have to wait for...

Sir: I gather from the address at the bottom of Mr Horton's passionate letter (11 April) from the University of lbadan, that he is a teacher in that university. I sincerely hope...

Sir: Since Patrick Cosgrave asserts (4 April) that those who seek any revival of Christianity in 'political dimension' (I rather thought the Founder had said his kingdom was not...

Sir: J. W. M. Thompson's 'Spectator's notebook' (4 April) refers to a complaint that 'the Arts Council's 'list of "bursaries" includes one of £500 to an American, living in...

Sir : I am grateful to Mr L. E. Weidberg for his complimentary remarks (Letters, 11 April) concerning my articles on communist affairs, but I cannot agree that Arthur Koestler's...

Sir: Marie Vaughan (Letters, 28 March) and R. J. Aspinall (Letters, 4 April) think that most women will prefer, given the choice, to get an abortion from a qualified doctor...

Sir: Nigel Lawson's headline Too much politics, not enough sex' (11 April) marks a change in SPECTATOR policy as welcome as it is overdue. Mr Auberon Waugh's candid reportage...

be a serious anthropolo- gist: his work on the Kalahari, a minority tribe of the old Eastern Region, would entitle him to that nomenclature. But he is certainly no...

Sir: In his review of The Habsburg Empire and The Last Habsburg (11 April) John Roberts refers to 'Metternich, who had also left to an exile from which he was not to return [my...

come from abroad each year to obtain private abortions. The Government's guess is less than half of this. On 25 March, Lady Serota said in the House of Lords that 'about fifty...

Sir: Mr Rupert Jackson (Letters, II April), in best debating style, attributes to me an argument which I have never supported, draws it to its 'logical' conclusion, and then...

From the 'Spectator.' 17 April 1869—Earl Russell brought in his Bill for the creation of Life Peerages on Friday week. It is a very little one, and de- mands a great surrender...

Sir: In his article on the Greater London Plan (28 March) Professor W. A. West asks what is the cost of not letting naturally prosperous areas develop. This is a 'planning'...

AFTERTHOUGHT T. C. SKEFFINGTON-LODGE T. C. Skeffington-Lodge, Labour candidate in the recent by-election at Brighton, told the electors that, win or lose, he intended to visit...

Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were invited to imagine that the Eurovision Song Contest had in fact been running for rather longer than its nine dim years and to compose a...

PHILIDOR Black _White 11 nwn 10 men B. Smi h (The Problemist, Nov. 1968). White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 434 (Shinkmant: Q - R 8!...

COMPETITION A perennial puzzler for students of Belloc's Cautionary Tales is the question of what the Lundy butler thought of his young master . . . `The Dear Old Butler...

Across 1 Borrowed form of Wordsworth's golden flower? (4-4) 5 Unceasing Fury (6) 9 'The -- to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow' (Shelley) (8) 10 A bit of this must...