C hristmas is based on a fact; not on the literal accuracy of every word in the Gospels, but on the fact of the Incarnation. If it is not true that the Word was made flesh in...

A drop of cheer Colin Welch -IL had an extraordinary experience recently at Kennedy Airport, New York. The young immigration officer beckoned me forward into his cubicle,...

e have an interesting article in this W „„ issue of the p on 2 1 nbustion. There ar a e per many peoplespontaneous who 'r do not believe in this well-documented phen omenon....

6 months: One year: UK Eire Surface mail £15.50 1R117.75 £18.50 01.00 1033.50 £37.00 Air mail £24.50 £49.00 US subscription price: $65.00 (Cheques to be made payable to the...

The last troubadour Auberon Waugh A this week I have been under intense pressure to say something rude about Mr Nigel Dempster, the distinguished gossip columnist of the Daily...

t\ licholas von Hoffman Washington I t is fitting in this land of churchgoers t that the soothsayers on the Council of Ci c i c 2, (1 °Inie Advisers should look to , ustmas to...

Peter Nichols , Rome I taly can be divided many ways, and each division has some validity: north and south, Catholic and Liberal, Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, St...

Elisabeth Luard In December the hills above Bethlehem are mantled with drifts of sweet-scented white blossom. The rose of Sharon is in flower, its clusters of ivory coronets...

mothy Garton Ash W here I am, is Germany', Thomas L. Mann once modestly declared, dur- ,° hi s exile from Hitler's Germany. Last p ee k there gathered in Paris a group of : l...

Christopher Walker Jerusalem C ynical outsiders who expected the Israeli judicial inquiry into the Beirut massacre to whitewash the Begin govern- ment have been quickly proved...

Richard West Johannesburg S outh Africa's raid last week on Lesotho, where 40 blacks were killed, was widely condemned by the outside world, including the British Government....

Paul Johnson I t's indicative of the unhealthy fascination TV exercises over Fleet Street that the Observer's 'Pendennis' column interprets Denis Thatcher's refusal to appear...

Peter Paterson O f Christmas Day at home before I reached the age of four, I have no recollection whatever. Nor can I recall the festival in 1936 when I was at the infants'...

Roy Kerridge C hristmas comes to Liverpool, a tree with lights is raised in the shopping centre and a town crier in full costume rings a bell and announces a 'Craft Fayre' in...

Jo Grimond LLooki ng back over 32 years in the House ooking Commons my first impression is that little has happened in politics. The place itself has certainly changed. MPs have...

Byron Rogers exits left, as abruptly as the bird that flew any man,' said Hotspur chattily. `But s , into into the Saxon hall out of the storms. That, they come when you do...

When it became evident that duelling was dead in England, and that a gentleman might refuse to be killed or to commit murder because somebody else had told a lie about him, men...

Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd A A !though the popularity of our ..hereditary sovereign knows no bounds (despite any damage done by what could be termed the modern `Mustique of...

r Ackroyd W OMAN IN FLAMES. A woman walk- Fl t down a street in Chicago burst into G ames for no apparent reason and was t u rned to death yesterday.' Daily ele graPh, 6 August...

The Fortune-teller S hiva Naipaul S i te paused at the familiar cave-like 1 h e ntrance. She had always hated coming I si t i r e. It was a punishment, a humiliation, e...

Evelyn Daube S ay the word 'Provence' and you release the genii of commerce from a bottle of tarragon vinegar. French regional food has become an object of ridicule and we have...

The psychiatric vote Sir: I refer to the article by Thomas Szasz titled 'Lunatic reform' (4 December), which Is concerned about the recent enfranchise- ,, in eut of...

Sir: Readers of Nicholas von Hoffman's ar- ticle 'A poetry of witness' (27 November), may like to know that we shall be publishing Carolyn Forche's book of poems The Country...

Sir: I read A. N. Wilson's review of The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Spectator, 27 November) with growing anger. I was appalled to discover that, although a...

Sir: As a doctor (and a psychiatrist) I ap- plaud your new-found sympathy with the anti-vivisectionists (Notebook, 4 December) and share your concern about the unhinged...

, • Christopher Booker is quite wrong to ( 7 , in his article on the death of Brezhnev s ° November), that 'the Communist : ste m • . . is like nothing ever seen before e , 11...

Sir: Murray Sayle might have been able to sum up this year's harvest in China from a train window (27 November), but one must assume that his view of Tien An Min square in...

Sir: Many years ago in the West Indies they were singing a simple hymn, 'Come by here, O Lord, come by here'. No one could doubt its meaning although the local pro- nounciation...

Tse-tung a 'quintessentially Shanghai per- son' (4 December). China has been a com- munist state for thirty-odd years precisely because he was not. Mao spent little time in...

1) The Twelve Days of Christmas Identify: a) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest b) The Two Gentlemen of Verona c) The Three Wise Men d) The Four Quartets e) The five Cinque ports...

Three comedians in China Harold Acton China Diary Stephen Spender and David Hockney (Thames & Hudson £10) W hen one is over 70 one watches the activities of other...

Sam White De Gaulle Bernard Ledwidge ( Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.95) G eneral de Gaulle became a legendary and historic figure by default. Even Let he launched his famous...

Peter Quennell Artists' London David Piper (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10.95) London in Verse Edited by Christopher Logue (Seeker & Warburg £5.50) C onstable rarely painted...

vri 01: -., • e Noel e M Come all ye shepherds from the field M And leave your crofts upon the fells, Come gaze upon sweet Mary's child — Make haste! inc day is crowned with...

Kay Dick The Well of Loneliness Radclyffe Hall (Virago £3.50) s o meone recently remarked, 'What more 4 . ean be said about The Well of Loneli- ,,' s s?' Reasonable enough as...

Virginia Llewellyn Smith The Food and Cooking of Russia Lesley Chamberlain (Allen Lane £9.95) The worker's is, as often as not,he worker's canteen lunch in Moscow' mashe d f...

Richard Ingrams I t is bad luck on the authors of joke books that they are never considered to be worth more than a few lines of review at Christmas. It is also bad luck on...

Lord Bilton Lord Bilton, though he only wrote for fun, Commanded higher prices than his son, The Honourable Peter Brocklehurst, Who wrote because he had to write or burst. This...

Patrick Leigh Fermor T he reviewer of a recent autobio g raphy took the author to task for omittin g all mention of his childhood. The reader, he maintained, was entitled at...

Harriet Waugh The Skull Beneath the Skin P.D. James (Faber & Faber £7.95) A Spy of the Old School Julian Rathbone (Michael Joseph £7.95) Insider Out Christopher Hudson...

The most compulsive reading for me in 1982 has been Indecent Exposure, — an alarming account of Wall Street plus Hollywood by New York journalist David McClintick. A weighty...

I would recommend P. J. K - van Selected Poems (Chatto & p ray' Ending in air Windus):,ward Thomas. ing' would grace the pages of D ui As lark ascending Sing its song there,...

Patrick Skene Catlmg Fiction dominated my reading in Ot te rs three books by long-established 111001 seemed superior in their humanity, 'N it 0 , 5 technical virtuosity....

I thought most critics were unfair to Frederic Raphael's Byron (Thames & Hud- son) and to him too. I found it so much more readable than other biographies of the great man of...

My first two choices are impeccable, if bor- ing — the choice, not the books — Graham Greene' s Monsignor Quixote (Bodley Head) and Kenneth Harris's Attlee (Weidenfeld &...

What do they know of books who only Bookers know? Best by far of my 1982 bunch has been Byron, the 12 volumes of whose letters had a perfect postscript added to them by the...

We asked some of our contributors to name some of the books which they most enjoyed in 1982. J. Enoch Powell R. A. Butler's The Art of Memory (Hodder & Stoughton) because it...

Here are the three books that I have en- joyed this year: The Emperor and the Ac- tress by Joan Haslip (Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Venice: The Most Triumphant City by George Bull...

sev eral books have given me unalloyed ea k sure this year. Kenneth Harris's Attlee ei denfeld & Nicolson) is a first class biography and a contribution to t °rY. The true...

My three for 1982 are the Beatrice Webb Diary (V ol 1) edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (Virago), The Newton Letter by John Banville (Seeker & Warburg) and H. H. Asquith:...

I greatly enjoyed Elizabeth Jenkins's The Shadow and the Light: A Defence of Daniel Dunglas Home, the Medium (Hamish Hamilton) a work with all the excitement of a first-rate...

Most of the new books I read are those written by friends (others I wait until they appear as paperbacks to buy them) of which my favourites for 1982 are: An English Education:...

The best read was Henry Fielding's A Voyage to Lisbon, last reprinted in 1976, appended to the Everyman Jonathan Wild. It tells the sad truth about voluntary travel; you cannot...

p a ys read books on impulse, not in the i f Work or for knowledge. Because my R ev ii . l ses are regulated by the events of the lNs night, I find it is the second illitlg that...

ueron Waugh .r eb .r eb joh ook I have enjoyed most this year was ()ill Mortimer's semi-autobiographical t a ti gine to the Wreckage (Weidenfeld). It sbseenllection of funny...

An unhoped-for Christmas offering — 500 pages of unknown Proustiana, recently ex- humed and deciphered with expertise and love by Professor Henri Bonnet. No longer will only...

P A e n ter in n dian Summer: A hundred recerivi was 857 this n y e e l l a r ( poems by Sacheverell Sitwell, introduced,_b, dlearning, 3 a li r e t n an as rewarding a brew...

Three books have given me enormous en- joyment this year. The first is Isabel Quigley's The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story (Chatto), the second is Robert Tombs's...

has gi veli d A ncient Greece by Richard Je1114111, A me m . ore pleasure than The Victorians a il s (Blackwell hardback 1980, year's paperbncd 1981): a blend of aesthetic...

Yet Being Someone Other by Laurens Van Der Post (Hogarth). The author excells in vignettes of persons and scenes in horrific circumstances — the whole against a background of a...

Tests of whether 1 am enjoying a book: Do I look forward to spending an evening with it? Do I then try to ration myself? Do I do this even if I am reviewing the book (com-...

Right royal David Wakefield J ean- Baptiste Oudry is the subject of a 11:1.113erb exhibition in Paris at the Grand phi (until 3 January 1983). From this 6, 1bi tinn, organised...

Rodney Milnes Le Grand Macabre (Coliseum) T igeti's opera has been described as one 1—i of those comparative rarities, a suc- cessful post-war comedy, which it is, and like...

Women alone Mark Amory Enough Rockaby (Cottesloe) Steak! Variations (Apollo) Messiah Great black became only because with her, too, the green in her jaunty, surprising...

Prize-giving Peter Ackroyd H ere are the Spectator Film Awards for 1982. The prizes, this year, are purely honorary; the committee debated the possibility of handing out some...

Thi s isn't altogether fair when it seenlff ; rikiamed when stmlletejio report ost Iri s h the explosion at BallykellY, b r a/1 11 . 1 1i ; 1 John Hume, leader of the SO?,...

Great and small John McEwen T here is a good mix of exhibitions at the Tate Gallery at the moment — large and small, old and new, something for every taste, much the most...

Unsavoury Taki New York W hen I heard they were massing out- side the Dakota my perverse streak made me drive by and look at them. There were hundreds of them, keeping a not...

Crocks of Vraie Croix de Gay are L./ exhausted, so are those of its replacement. I am desperately searching for another 1976 Pomerol of com- parable quality, but please order no...

Christmas bores Jeffrey Bernard H ere we go again. The obligatory Christmas piece. Well, where were we? Oh yes, the December dialogue. `What are you doing this year,...

Dr Nincompoop Patrick Marnham F aced with a nil-profits situation the Sunday Times is resorting to desperate measures. Readers of last week's page two found themselves face to...

No. 1249: French without tears Set by Jaspistos: In Terence Rattigan's play of the above title one character says of another, 'Elle a des idees au dessus de sa Bare'. You are...

Jaspistos reports: Competitors were asked for a unseasonable poem in dispraise of Christmas. Schenorhavor Dzenount! Roomsaid Joulu Puhi! Boldog Karacsony! Nodlaig Nait Cugat!...

a Raymond Keene T his week a small chess brain and Memory teaser to keep readers alert :er the Christmas period, after all that key and Christmas pudding. For the "itir Most...

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A first prize of thirty pounds and two further prizes of fifteen pounds will be awarded for the first three correct solutions opened on 10 January. Entries to: Jumhojac, The...

T he State Department in Washington refused to confirm that an American air base at Daws Hill, Buckinghamshire, would be used as a command headquarters in time of war, but...

GIVE HIM TO THE ANGELS by Harry Greb. J. Bernard, c/o The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1. PAXTON AND THE BACHELOR DUKE by Violet Markham and any work by Edith Whar-...

Answer How does each question lead to the answer 9 Name . Address: Company (if eligible for special prize)

Spectator Treasure Hunt. Each clue is made up of three separate questions designed to give the same answer. Both answers are names of places in the British Isles. Once you have...

How . . ........... .. .. . . ...... 0...Trty ....... ..... eligi a ble for special prize) d oes each question lead to the ........

1) They once had a bit of trouble at the Post Office here. 2) Molly lived at 7 Eccles Street. 3) 'I did think I did see all Heaven before me and the great God himself' said...

her e, he dug out something suitable or the occasion — his ninety-second attempt to be precise. y oung Fawley knew it under another me.You can't often see it in weather like...

Abc$AAAAAAmmuonamorl Indiana University A x( 4 APR 2 1 1983 1 q Library ,,, ,A7AAAAAAAAAoxamonnesal Published by The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL

(A) ARTICLE (AR) THE ARTS rC V) ANOTHER VOICE ) IN THE CITY (CO) COMPETITION ILLUSTRATION ( LA) LEADING ARTICLE (L) Lorrox (N) NOTEBOOK (P) Poem (PC) POLITICAL COMMENTARY (PS)...