T he decision of Solihull Council to post- pone its reintroduction of selective secondary education will please devotees of the comprehensive ideal; but the decision has been...

Responsible for Ulster? Charles Moore W hen some ghastly blunder like the breakout of 38 murderous criminals from the Maze Prison occurs, people seem to react in one of two...

I n 19 07 an extraordinary house was completed at No. 8 Addison Road in K ensington. It was built by the architect Halsey i alsey Riccardo for Sir Ernest Debenham, t h e...

UK hire Surface mail Air mail 6 months: 115.50 IRE17 .75 £18.50 124.50 One year. 01.00 1RE35 .50 137.00 149.00 Cheques to be made payable to the Spectator and sent to...

Back to class Auberon Waugh prostitutes' was the description which 558 prep school headmasters heard applied to themselves at a headmasters' beano in Cambridge recent- ly. In...

Murray Sayle Tokyo E very Japanese schoolchild knows Sep- tember 1 as a day of disaster. On that day a great earthquake levelled the un- suspecting cities of Tokyo and...

Christopher Hitchens Washington Tn his book The Paranoid Style in Ameri- can Politics, Richard Holfstadter observ- ed that 'the paranoid has all the informa- tion he needs. He...

Robert Haupt Melbourne A spinnaker is draped on Sydney Town Hall. Bob Hawke, the now-teetotal Australian Prime Minister, is saturated from the outside with champagne. Australi...

Charles Glass Damascus I n No Man's Land Walid Jumblatt is driving at 90 mph in his white Range Rover along the highway leading from Damascus to Lebanon, returning to his home...

J. D. B. McCLEERY: 'The McCleery Method of Billiard Playing' (San Francisco 1890). A Mc- Cleery, 32 Plewlands Gardens, Edinburgh. GESTA ROMANORUM (translated Charles Swan) and...

Richard West Bridport, Dorset Mot long ago I watched the start of a solemn, left-wing TV play about Brid- port, attempting to show the role of the town in Britain's...

Snakes and Ladders Jock Bruce-Gardyne S elect Committees do not come much grander than the one which last week told the Government to stop pussy-footing and join the Snake....

The politics of words Paul Johnson m on a sharp learning-curve, fellow 1 Liberals', admitted their candidate at the recent Penrith by-election. Party con- ferences are...

The simple truth is that in Ulster England is not hated, and that, once given control over their own local business, the vast majority of Ulstermen would recognise that they...

Colin Welch O n television I regret seeing more than I regret missing. What I did miss recently, with great regret, was William Trevor's latest play. According to uniform- ly...

Negritude Sir: In his effort to discredit Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the Angolan 'Unita' Party, Richard Dowden (Letters, 24 September) suggested a bad connotation to...

Sir: Olivia O'Leary's article on the Irish abortion referendum (17 September) was remarkable for its omissions. It omitted the fact that the European Parliament resolved to...

anyone can get from Scotland to Angola. Scots are used to this kind of metropolitan parochialism, and I do not need to teach Spectator readers about the long Scottish tradition...

Sir: 'There is nothing necessarily wrong with beards,' says Charles Moore ( 24 September), but 'men with beards In modern England are trying to saY something'. What nonsense! Of...

criticising the editor of the Literary Review. We have been asked to make clear that the solicitor Michael Rubinstein, who advises the Literary Review on legal matters, was not...

Sissinghurst romance Nigel Nicolson Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West Victoria Glendinning (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £12.50) W hen I first read this book in type- script, there...

Alastair Forbes A Durable Fire: Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper 1913-1950 Edited by Artemis Cooper (Collins £12.95) Bendor Leslie Field (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £12.95) spent...

Francis King A Hot Country Shiva Naipaul (Hamish Hamilton £7.95) T he country in which this novel is set is 'a tract of land perched uneasily on the sloping shoulder of South...

John Stewart Collis The Tolstoys: Twenty-four Generations of Russian History, 1353-1983 Nikolai Tolstoy (Hamish Hamilton £12.50) N ot long ago I received a letter from...

Patrick Skene Catling Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour Judith Martin (Hamish Hamilton £9.95) N owhere else in the world are fashions more volatile, more...

Terence de Vere White In Camden Town David Thomson (Hutchinson £8.95) oodbrook was a deceptively quiet Vhf book, so quiet that it posed a threat to reviewers in a hurry; so...

A.N. Wilson Kate's House Harriet Waugh (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £7.95) H arriet Waugh's previous novels have .1 I been sharp comedies in appalling taste. They produced a...

Duncan Fallowell Wagner and the Romantic Disaster Burnett James (Midas Books £12.50) W agner's bibliography is enormous, said to be the largest after God's and Hitler's —...

Half-pro John McEwen Matthew Smith and Tolly Cobbold, Eastern Arts: Fourth National Exhibition (Barbican Art Gallery till 30 October) Joseph Beuys: Drawings (V&A till 3...

Transatlantic Giles Gordon Hamlet (Shaw) Intellectually, Sam Shepard's plays repel. I Indeed, there is no intellect, nor does he construct a play any more than Jackson ,...

Close-ups Peter Ackroyd Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean ('18' Lumiere) T his '5 and Dime', the American equi- valent of the corner shop, is situated in...

Deja vu Richard Ingrams P arapsychologists are now ready to recognise the phenomenon of the man who is convinced that he has 'been here before'. Certain people, known to...

Punch drunk Taki I n Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro Harry is a two-fisted, brawling, hard- drinking writer dying of gangrene some- where in the Kenyan bush. His rich wife...

Lying abroad P.J. Kavanagh irn the 17th century Sir Henry Wooton 1 said 'an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the g ood of his coun- try' and the remark has...

Home truths Jeffrey Bernard M ost days pa g e three of the Daily . Telegraph is a haven of sense and sen- sib i l i ty. There's usually somethin g there to remind one that the...

Jaspistos reports: Competitors were asked for a piece of prose containing, in any order, the following words: gung-ho, woozily, mollycoddle, shag, vermiform, terminology,...

No. 1289: Rum titles Set by Jaspistos: There are, or have been, books, fictional or factual, with the follow- ing titles: The Romance of the London Underground, Madam Madcap,...

A prize of ten pounds will be awarded for the first correct solution opened on 17 October. Entries to: Crossword 627, The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WCIN 2LL....

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Blitz finish Raymond Keene A fter Niksic Kasparov went on to dominate a powerful double-round blitz tournament at Herceg-Novi, an event remarkable for a number of reasons —...

A fter a mass break out from the Maze prison, Belfast, 38 members of the IRA were hunted by the army and police. One prison officer was murdered during the escape and six others...