or over Israel There is no disputing the undesirability and even the illegality of the Israeli interception of a Lebanese passenger plane. It does not however, he in the mouths...

The coincidence between the undoubted success of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference in Ottawa and the reaching of a peak of discontent with Britain's EEC membership in...

Sir: 'Blacklist these states' August 11, was a tonic, for you very rightly took the issue of hijacking out of the context of any dispute between states or groups of states....

Sir: In your issue of August II 1972, Cato in 'Another Spectator's Notebook' commented on Anthony Burgess's appeal against those judges and other members of the public who were...

"gets too much out of kilter with what is acceptable to society then of course there will be censorship, and I for one would not resist it." Acceptable, one assumes, to the...

McManus would not have been murdered if A Clockwork Orange had not been licensed, would this prove the case for stricter censorship of films? It is obviously inconceivable to Mr...

Sir: Mr Heffer's article 'The Liverpool , example' (July 28) describes the Liver' pool city centre when the shops and offices have closed at night as being more like a ghost...

Sir: As an ex-prisoner who has becorne rehabilitated in spite of, rather than because of this country's penal sYs," tern, it was good to read Jim Daly s lucid exposition of the...

I lk see that Rodney Milnes would ilo e to hear the counter-tenor James wtnan singing in Handel opera. her He need wait only until Novem, , when the Handel Opera Society '...

I have only two claims as a reWevser of recent fiction " writes your ii e W an Mr Peter Ackroyd (August " I have never written a novel, never intend to write on e read:„ . ....

r , I accept the news that food is even clearer in some Common Market countriOS than it is in Britain. ,This goes some way towards prothat ' foodwise ' the Common arket is a...

Sir: I cannot speak-for those whom Cato ('Another Spectator's Notebook,' August 11) terms the abortion lobby; nor for abortionists, whom Cato mistakenly equates with those...

that Dr. Potts (not Pott) and Rene6 Short would be happy to 'lie down' with Distillers. These whisky millionaires in good faith sent out to the public a most useful drug,...

Sir: In his article on the Watergate affair, 'Nixon — America's Charles I?', Hugh Trevor-Roper writes, "The world in general is more interested in American foreign policy than...

From the Revd R. J. K. Law Sir: Martin Sullivan in his article 'Prayers and Petitions' (August 11), has succeeded in removing the sting out of his otherwise challenging article...

Sir: One or two inadvertent errors appeared in my letter which you published last week under the heading Apologia transfugae, to accompany one or two pieces of calculated...

Sir: My taste for science-fiction is less well-developed than that of Kingsley Amis, but I was impressed by his review of Arthur C. Clarke's new novel (August 4) and found his...

Sir: In The Spectator of August 4, 1973, Professor Simon Schama writes in his review of J. F. Bernard's biography of Talleyrand: "If, subsequently he had not quite succeeded in...

The vice-presidency of Spiro Agnew has ii"ot, on the whole, excited much enthusiasm even among the most devout Republicans, and it is likely that the call for the impeachment or...

Littlejohn and Robin Hood Patrick Cosgrave ,Ther e is still something fresh to be said about 1 ,h e Littlejohn business; something that has a caring, not merely upon what is...

Faith, fact and the Shroud John D. Lambert In these days of scepticism an announcement that science is about to support faith • is quite an event. So the report in the British...

Bombs away-but what now? Bill Manson Spare a thought for the diplomats, do-gooders and journalists in Phnom Penh. It is easy `Ater, you're on the outside looking in to ra...

The outmoded nursery schools Rhodes Boyson The battlefield of education since the war is littered with the corpses of discarded theories introduced for a season and then found...

Elephants and economics Molly Mortimer The Canadian government ran short on Ugandan flags as protesting Asians stole them by night; the Zambian leader stole not so silently...

Licensed to float Oliver Stewart Predatory pressures are being put on recr e e done! boating. The events of Cowes ‘Y e rc e have intensified them. The aim is to " c6 tei...

Wilfrid Sendall ' lr ' my knapsack I have been carrying for s ome years two quotations and one anecdote, in much the manner, I am told, that prospect ors carry basic equipment...

Donald Watt The academic year is over. The students have largely departed. The last of the seemingly endless piles of examination scripts have been returned to the university...

Definitions of love Martin Sullivan The notion of love is not peculiar to religion in general nor to Christianity in particular, but they have both focused attention upon it,...

Research and commitment Bernard Dixon The annual report of the Medical Research Council is a staid and sober document — a catalogue of sterling achievement rather than a noisy...

The grand mannner Peter Quince For one reason and another, I have been thinking about landscape gardening in these leisurely days of high summer, Almost every inch of the...

Peter Ackroyd Flight One Charles Carpentier (Eyre Methuen £2.40) • The Thing He Loves Brian Glanville (Seeker and Warburg £2.10) The Polygamist Ndabaningi Sithole (Hodder and...

Richard Shone E C ,roldsworthy Lowes Dickinson E. M. Forster ,,nrevvord by W. H. Auden (Edward Arnold tI binger Edition £4.75) ' Though never popular, this biography, for r...

When I was young I used to , hate detective and thriller fiction which did not have the same hero appearing in successive books. I have long, of course, got over this, and can...

Anthony W. Clare Educability and Group Differences A. R. Jensen (Methuen 0.90) Arthur Jensen is the man who, in the words of an American professor of biology, has split "...

Timothy Bainbridge The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851) Timothy Clark (Thames and Hudson £4.50) This book is a justification of a certain kind of...

Paperbacks There has recently been a revival of rural memories in paper. back form. Now Coronet have issued a trilogy from Fred Arch. er, The Secrets of Bredon Hill (35p),...

Bookend This autumn's publishing programmes, looking for all the world like last spring's publishing programmes (which in several cases they are) make better reading than many...

Praise for the general excellence of the Sadler's Wells Ring, an extraordinary achievement and one of the most heart-warming Operatic events of the past twenty Years, has been...

bleeding Kenneth Hurren AAialras The bard had a bad week in both town and country, the Bankside Globe over in Southwark offering a treatment of Antony and Cleopatra in which a...

Michael Blakemore is apparently not the only one of the National Theatre's directors to greet the arrival of Peter Hall at the helm with pressing_ engagements elsewhere. While...

Fire of revenge -, Christopher Hudson Claiming to be inspired by the exploits of Eddie Egan, a celebrated New york policeman. Badge 373 ( X ' ABI) is more likely inspired by...

The summer round Evan Anthony Summertime, and the viewing is easy. The one-man show — cannon fodder for the critic — is an almost non-existent event, and with the absence of...

Clive Gammon The object," said the radio cornmentator, who plainly knew a lot about it, "is to separate the men from the boys. Not the quick from the dead." The 371-mile Senior...

Benny Green Having wandered abroad the other week armed with nothing more substantial than a pedagogic peashooter, I appear to have stumbled under the guns of two extremely...

with only three meetings to exercise the mind this Saturday. Richest prize at the main one, Newbury, is the E7,000-added Geoffrey Freer Stakes, but rivalling it in interest —...

Nicholas Davenport As a postscript to my discussion last week on penal money rates there is a report in the market that one of the discount houses is in trouble and is being...

Hardly in the great tradition of the officer being handed his revolver and left in his room, Hamish Conochie, City editor of the News of the World, has resigned following an...

Go home Yanks Nephew Wilde The last week has been a period of gloom for me and other small investors too, I would expect. But what advice can anyone give? The best way in...