A FTER the Prime Minister's assurance that Great Britain will go to the United Nations if Egypt refuses to co- operate with the proposed Suez Canal users' associa- tion, the...

ESTABLISHED 1828 No. 6691 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1956 PRICE 9d.

A FEW days before its first birthday, commercial television held an anticipatory celebration by putting on a sponsored programme. Its history is interesting. Pye Ltd., the...

By Our German Correspondent Bonn I T is now clear that bureaucracy is to be the scapegoat of German Communism. The interval of indecision and more or less indiscriminate...

eUE2 continues to monopolise attention, and the Parliamen- tary debate of last week already seems remote. On the first day the point at issue seemed to be whether, if Colonel...

BY RICHARD H. ROVERE New York I N San Francisco. during the recent Republican Convention, there was an engaging young comedian in a place of entertainment called The Hungry Eye...

BY CHARLES CURRAN T HE Suez crisis is moving towards a victory for the United States. It will be a cheque-book victory. Mr. Dulles wants a users' boycott of the Canal, for the...

taunt those of his colleagues who have to write every day, or nearly every day; but I really cannot let Peter Simple, of the Daily Tele- graph, get away with this...

the Prime Minister made his broadcast a month ago, that he was drawing a parallel between Suez and Munich : it seemed to me to be much more probable that the parallel was with...

DURING THE LAST few months the Archbishop of Canterbury has been remarkably active politically—on Cyprus. and the Death Penalty—and now on Suez he has made weighty pro-...

noble Lords who wish to speak, so it is suggested that we sit through dinner. Dinner can be provided here, but it would be convenient if those noble Lords who want it would let...

Ali's refusal to continue as Prime Minister, has been interpreted as evidence that the politicians have defeated the officials in the struggle for control in Pakistan. This...

La Cenerentola. 8.25, Kitchen problems in Ancient Greece. 8.40, La Cenerentola. 9.40, The Music of Uganda : recent trends. 10.10, Contemporary Gali- cian verse. 10.45, Spanish...

Russia, 'the English books translated by the Russians were chiefly those of Charles Dickens—or of fellow travellers in the West. But since Guy Burgess went there they have...

BY S. E. FINER* E do our utmost to get a dollar's worth for every dollar spent just as we would if we were merchan- dising commodities instead of selling men or measures.' Thus...

BY DESMOND DONNELLY, MP T HE Blackpool Conference of the Labour Party a fortnight hence is the first to take place in the new era. Mr. Attlee's leadership is dead and in Elysian...

BY GUY BURGESS* Y interview with Mr. Tom Driberg, a top executive of the British Labour Party, who is in Moscow for an important conference with Comrade N. S. Khrush- 411....

BY JOHN BETJEMAN WAS at the Preparatory Schools Headmasters' Con- / ference last week in Oxford and learned about The Bulge. It was a most interesting experience to see so many...

HER HUSH-HUSH WEDDING.—Sunday Pictorial, September 16. ONLY 26 guests.—News Chronicle, September 18. . . . 22 solemn guests.—Sketch, September 18. Tun 17 guests . . .—Daily...

W E started talking about our favourite sounds and almost at once came up against the difficulty of divorcing them from their associations. The bells of a caravan, children...

has been teaching the general public what foods are best for health, but such teach- ing today is often nullified because many of the best foods have lost their gustatory appeal...

SIR,—You have stressed that the Suez dispute must be settled by negotiation and not by force. That means, of course, that we have to negotiate with the Egyptians and not with...

may not, be defen- sible in certain respects. Let us agree he had 'no real insight into character' in his novels— but he possessed a rarer quality : he could, in a phrase, give...

Brett Young, is now in active prepara- tion. May I, therefore, beg the hospitality of your columns to ask if those who possess letters from him will be so kind as to allow me to...

SIR,—As one who played a minor part in Mr. Peter Fleming's brilliant presentation (for two nights only) of Bulldog Drummond at Newport Pagnell in 1927 (?), I must draw attention...

Chesterton Paul Jennings, Guy Ramsey Suez L. A. Jackson Bulldog Drummond E. P. Warner Mechanised Brigade John Guest Sandwich de Luxe R. Lush Food Education Dr. Franklin Bicknell...

pened to be walking down the middle of a quiet street near Savile Row when a flashy roadster drew up quietly at my elbow and a fully professional lady at the wheel (no amateur,...

Sandwich-de-luxe' by your columnist John Betjeman, September 7. By what reasoning does he consider 7s. 6d. expensive for two rounds of tongue sand- wiches and a pot of coffee...

Euston 3221

Diable Au Corps Now that the London season of the Berliner Ensemble is over, it is both possible and desirable for a critic in this country to estimate Brecht's place in the...

As in 1951, the great event of the Venice Festival this year is a new work by Stravinsky, specially commissioned for St. Mark's Cathe- dral. Rumour had it at first that the new...

CYMBELINE. (Old Vic.) THERE is a perennial problem about minor Elizabethan plays—whether to produce them with a completely straight face, let the grotesque strands of plot and...

SEPTEMBER 24, 1831 THE REFORM BILL.—At five o'clock on Mon- day, Lord JOHN RUSSELL moved the third reading of the Bill. The Speaker put the ques- tion. The "ayes" answered, as...

FOR the second year Arthur Tooth and Sons have invited a critic—on this occasion Herbert Read—to choose an exhibition of paintings by a group of British artists whose work he...

THE KING AND I. (Carlton.) —EVERY SECOND COUNTS and THE GREEN MAN. (Gaumont.) . —LETTERS FROM MY WINDMILL. (Curzon.) TWO Rodgers and Hammerstein mtisicals in two weeks invite...

Now as I said to 'Dickie' Mountbatten, When Noel (or Willie) was there, And the talk, of an intimate pattern, Was racy, allusive and rare— Well, perhaps it'd sound a bit silly...

PROVINCIAL newspapers used to have a con- vention whereby variety shows at the local theatre were not covered by a critic. The tickets would be given to some old reporter, who...

Donning the Buskin BY JOHN HOLLOWAY W • HEN Chaucer's Monk had told the Canterbury Pilgrims some seventeen of the one hundred tragedies which he had up his sleeve for them, he...

MR. MASON BROWN is a distinguished American dramatic critic who was asked by the Saturday Review to cover the Democratic and Republican Conventions of 1952. 'Once started,' he...

LITERARY historians can be divided into two schools—the messy and the jerky. The messy are those who are aware of the relations (but what relations?) between literature and...

6d.) Equally sedate English piece, set in cathedral town—Chester, perhaps?—not very far in place or time from Mrs. Maybrick, and with overtones of that real-life lady's cele-...

DEATH OF AN ADMIRAL. By Gilbert Hackforth-Jones. (Hodder and Stoughton, 12s. 6d.) Long, meaty mystery solved by naval two-and-a-half-striper in course of fascinatingly...

12s. 6d.) On one island at the entrance to the Bristol Channel is a government research station; on another, close by, is a community of Benedictines; over them both wheel the...

Sentimental yet exciting piece about how 'development' threatens a honeysuckled corner of 'Old Virginny,' along with its sweet, eccentric old lady and couple of charming...

6d.) Diamond-smuggling and refugee-running across the halo-Yugoslav frontier by a writer who patently doesn't care for the Tito regime; who knows his Venice and Trieste; and who...

6d.) Plot itself nothing to write home about, but admirably sensible study of neuro-alcoholic wife-murderee, and terrifying glimpse of lynch-lust that lies (apparently) just...

of people—ex-mistress, repressed daughter, frustrated son, bitchy daughter-in-law—have reason to wish successful small-town American businessman dead : who will try it on, and...

This must be the fourth little masterpiece of suspense and ambiguity concocted by Miss Curtiss, and the magic is still at work : a man and a woman close in to catch a murderess,...

WHEN the exhibition which this album commemorates opened in February, several Paris papers spread the news on their front pages; Paris Match offered photographs of Bernard...

10s. 6d.) This impudently improbable confection concerning mysterious megalomaniac millionaire chasing Hitler's gold in an ocean-going yacht is sad let-down from usual high...

dolls, shamuses and a stiff in a locked room, croaked by his own John Roscoe; title from Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam.

SOME time ago members of the BBC's television Brains Trust, who should have known better, tried to make out that Freud was a great religious thinker. Dr. Philp's study should...

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF FISHES. By Maurice Constantin-Weyer. (Richard Bell, 15s.) THESE two books approach the animal kingdom from very different angles, M. Constantin-Weyer...

Two quite formidably clever women novelists this week take— Penelope Mortimer with The Bright Prison (Michael Joseph, 12s. 6d.) and Brigid Brophy with The King of a Rainy...

'THE public is not undiscerning,' C. P. Scott wrote in his celebrated 'facts are sacred' pro- nouncement: 'It recognises the authentic voices of conscience and conviction.' It...

As T. S. Eliot pointed out a long time ago, every age needs its own translations to bring the classics of other languages into a more immediate relationship with contemporary...

THE sub-title of James Turner's The Dolphin's Skin (Cassell, 21s.) is 'six studies in eccen- tricity' and it consists of essays on Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, Edmund...

.THERE is no need to . make more than the modest claim of antiquarian interest.' Mr. Grant says, to justify the publication for the first time of Newcastle's poems to his future...

FEW contemporaries can have so 'wide a range of direct experience of Theatre in Asia as Mr. Faubion Bowers, whose Theatre in the East (Nelson, 42s.) surveys the many forms of...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT What makes the IMF visit of the British Chancellor this year so profoundly un- realistic is that we know he will repeat the Goverhment's firm resolve to...

BY CUSTOS As the Suez crisis gets more entangled there is no inclination on the real investor's part to add to his commitments on the Stock Exchange. Speculation seems to have...

cuttings are potted up at this time of year. There are various composts, but the main ingredients for cuttings are equal quantities of good leaf mould and fine loam with a good...

lived with my grandfather, I often used to be called out to hear the corncrake, and many an hour 1 spent, in my innocence, trying to locate the bird in the long grass. The...

Salmon and sea-trout are again reported running up-river in the flood here in extra- ordinary numbers. There have never been so many in the pools, I am told. Years of plenty...

BY PHILIDOR No. 68. L. I. LOSHINSKY (1st Prize, 'Trog,' 1950) WHITE (10 men) Solution to last week's problem by G uidel I i Q-Q 7, threat Q x Kt. It is always disconcerting...

ACROSS 1 Cat and mouse in the wine-cellar? (6) 4 No more consomme? I shan't stay! (5, 3) 9 Is done in a resounding way (6). 10 Race observed from the mountains (8). 12 One...

BY IAN NIALL JUST lately weather predictors have been try- ing their best to find some improvement in the remnant of summer, but have too often shown themselves to be not...

THE first three were never in doubt. From the moment that the counting began, Sir Winston went into the lead, with Lord Russell a close, but never dangerous, second; and Gilbert...

A well-known advertisement of one of the big banks consists of a light, amusing and occasionally informative paragraph on some topic connected with the month in which it...