ir HE visit of the French Prime Minister, M. Guy Mollet, to London at the invitation of the British Government, successful though it may have been, can hardly be said to have...

T HE Prime Minister's homily to the Federation of British Industries was unfortunately timed. The Government, rather than industry, must take the blame for the failure to halt...

ESTABLISHED 1828 No. 6665 FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 1956 PRICE 7d.

they completely justify the great school of interpretation of Soviet events, which includes such writers as Mr. Nicolaevsky, Mr. Dallin, Mr. Borkenau and Mr. Arden. Frowned on...

still have been a primitive welter of ignorance and suffering. For motives both selfish and unselfish, whole centuries of development have been forced into mere decades, but the...

the price of the Spectator. On April 6 it will g o from 7d. to 9d., the price at which its competitors have been selling for the past five years.

BY HENRY FAIRLIE T HAVE heard from more than one quarter that among the I most effective advocates in the Cabinet today is Mr. Derick Heathcoat-Amory. Ever since he entered...

T HE week's main news has been the fluttering of Muscovite dovecots caused by the leaking of Mr. khrushchev's speech in denunciation of the misdeeds of Josef Stalin. The...

MR. MALENKOV'S visit has no doubt been a great success from the Russian point of view. Millions of readers of the popular press made the astounding discovery that a Communist...

tion over the Chinese threat to Formosa last year we took the line of realism and horse-sense. 'How can we treat with the ingrates who killed American boys in Korea?' said Mr....

Two THOUSAND years ago today, by modern reckoning, Caius Julius Caesar was murdered. Daily Telegraph, March 15. . . . There was between 1 tic and AD 1 no year 0, so that this...

hanging has been tabled by Conservative MPs. Sir Thomas Moore wants the issue to be tested at a general election; but hanging is not a party issue, and even if it were it would...

or is asked to leave, his job, my normal reaction is of pleasure. His successor is unlikely to be more incompetent. Sir Miles Thomas is the only exception I can call to mind;...

M ID-WAY in 1953, after the Capricorn-Africa Society had been (or five years in search of a political philosophy capable of expressing in terms of Africa the spiritual and...

immediate surroundings of St. Paul's is as good a compromise as can be imagined between the commercial interests which think it a lot of high-falutin arty nonsense anyway and...

By DONALD McI. JOHNSON, MP T HE social history of bureaucracies is in its infancy. A step forward was undoubtedly taken in an article in The Economist by the discovery of...

BY D. M. P. TASKER* With these ideas at the back of my mind, I have recently been conducting an experiment amongst young people with *King George VI Training Officer, Church of...

BY JOHN BETJEMAN W HAT is London University? It is not the Colleges like Bedford, Imperial, Birkbeck, The Slade School, King's, and others, any more than Oxford University is...

H ISTORY, a relentless type-caster, reminds us that in war every British Army makes its debut in the role of Cinderella. Though an extraordinarily nice girl, Cinderella lacked...

been told in the popular weeklies (with varying inaccuracy) over the last thirty-five years—besides being recorded in Lord Wavell's history. But I wonder if Strix knows that...

not mentioned an important point which has escaped the notice of those misguided people who have tried to ban the novel. Operation Heartbreak and the film The Man Who Never Was....

about Lord Bessborough. In 1920 Lord Bessborough's father died and it was reported that Lord Desborough had died and flattering obituary notices were published. I remember this...

Sig,—While I am grateful to Mr. B A i'isting for the publicity he gives me, may I point ,nit that I did not write what he says I wrote, a s he will sec if he reads more...

Euston 3221

Cyprus—The Other Side R. Windsor Clive A Saver's Budget James K. Norrish New Zealand's History Sir Clifton Webb The Corpse and the Haversack Admiral Sir William James, A. C. B....

early New Zea- land settlers, and others, who have old letters, diaries, pictures, or articles which throw light on colonial life and its links with this country. These things,...

the clouds of conceit from which you wrote your leading article and tell me what you think is my dream world and how you would shake me out of it? It is probably true that a...

THAT valiant-for-truth modern crusader, G. K. Chesterton, once observed of the English people that its virtue was geniality and its vice gentility. It is in the light of that...

ONE MAN MUTINY. (Warner.) = JURAL. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) — BEYOND THE RIVER. (Rialto.)—THE ExTRA DAY. (Plaza.) WHO DONE IT? (Dominion and New Vic- toria.) — THE BLACK TENT....

Biter Bit it is tempting to treat Sir Alfred Munnings's retrospective show of over 300 works at Burlington House as summarily as he, on a famous occasion which started a new...

(RECORDING COMPANIES: AP, Archive Pro- duction; C, Columbia; Cap, Capitol; D, Decca; DT, Ducretet-Thomson; H, HMV; LI, London International; N, Nixa; OL, Oiseau Lyre; V, Vox.)...

TARITHA. By Arnold Ridley and Mary Cathcart Borer. (Duchess.) MYSTERY plays tend to be of two kinds : the sensational and the domestic. In the one lights switch feverishly from...

MARCH 26, 1831 WHAI. if it were an ordinary case, might be ter med the grand stage of the Reform Bill, is safely pissed; the Bill was read a second time on Tuesday, after a...

Edward Gibbon BY PETER QUENNELL T HE ancient Athenians used sometimes to debate, strolling beneath the plane trees or lounging in the portico, whether an unmistakably ugly man...

I AM FIFTEEN AND I DO NOT WANT TO DIE. By Christine Arnothy. (Collins, 10s. 6d.) A FRIGHTENED child suffering in the horrors of war is a theme to which we bring our own...

THE letters in this collection were all written home from the Crimea by a young Rifle Brigade officer who was serving in the campaign there, for most of the time as ADC to a...

Admirably straightforward, admirably unpretentious, admirably fast-moving cold-war thriller, with a reasonably true-to-life British agent chasing the papers through both...

OLD HALL, NEW HALL. By Michael Innes. (Gollancz, 12s. 6d.) Look where Lucky Jim's landed! Slap in the middle of one of those Oxford-Companion-to-English-Literature...

BLACK PEARL: The Hairdresser from Haiti. By Arthur and Elizabeth Odell Sheehan. (Harvill Press, 16s.) PIERRE TOUSSAINT, known as the `Black Pearl,' is indeed a worthy subject...

and solved on a peaceful island of Aphrodite, with all the appropriate decorations in the way of figs and wine, and kisses in the white moonlight. Very well done, with likely...

10s. 6d.) Mrs. Gilruth has a neat, smooth, even faintly witty style which deserves more credible characters than she has dreamed up for this cosy little number about a pleasure...

special and unmistakable merit of Arthur Upfield's Australian detective stories lies not so much in his plots, though these are ingenious enough, but in his creation of the...

Yet another detective story set at sea—this time on the long run from Australia. Margot Neville has a shrewd, tart way with rich, sophisticated Australians, and in this novel...

ls. 6d.) This is the fourth novel in which William Pepper of United States Intelligence finds himself involved in a counter- espionage job abroad into which stalks the tweeded,...

Hammond, 9s. 6d.) This tale of the death of an ex-schoolmistress in West Virginia is one of those old-fashioned American detective stories that can be even slower in movement...

on the other hand, is a consistently chilling tale of how circumstances themselves can close in to kill. An ironic, pitiful American story of blind—very blind—inexorable...

very sedate English story that is all the more convincing for being about such commonplace people. Elizabeth Ferrars crochets her highly ingenious plots as placidly as an old...

hUDD SCHULBERG'S Waterfront (The Bodley Head, 15s.) is a sort of diffusion of his script for the film On the Waterfront; a wonder- fully vigorous conjuring of a whole...

is a compelling ordinariness about Josephine Bell's places and people, and this time murder arises out of who's going to look after aunty when Gillian gets married? The murder...

6d.) Out of the wrapper at you comes a rakish, scarlet car, raising clouds of dust in the sunny Spanish landscape. Hot, fast, highly coloured—a fair indication of what's inside,...

drinkers write about it : beer drinker s drink. There is no end to books about win e ' by contrast to a dearth of readable or reliabl e books on beer, though beer has been th e...

Donald Ford. (Constable, 20s.) MR. FORD has served as Chairman of the LCC Childen's Committee and has had wide experi' ence with children deprived of a normal home life. He...

By Donald Creighton. (Macmillan, f2,2s.) THE first volume of Professor Donald Crcigh- ton's life of Sir John Macdonald showed that the Canadian statesman had found an ideal...

7s. 6d.) This fantasy-biography is what one has come to expect from the publishers, who have long been doing their best as an advance echelon of Minitrue. I have just noted on...

been necessary for a long time that the work of the many Anglo-Saxon scholars in illuminating the history of England between the end of the Roman occupation and the Norman...

of Elizabethan love sonnets in mind. True it is, that their mellifluously monotonous hyperboles make up one of the less intriguing corners of English literature. Mr. Lever's...

after the First World War. when he came upon a bookshop in Piccadilly 'where an astonishing display of sumptuous, dazzling, richly decorated books caught my eye and arrested my...

This is a heart-warming story of a very success- ful American bee'-keeper. Apparently he began when he was a boy and built up a business to a state of international renown. His...

has now been brought up to date by Mr. Roy Hay. He has kept as close to the original as possible but has had to make many necessary additions owing to the lack of labour and...

by the Trianon Press for the William Blake Trust, £25.) THIS reproduction in facsimile is based on the copy in the Lessing J. Rosenwald collection in the Library of Congress,...

BY IAN N1ALL TREE EARNING—something that Canadians and the paper-making corporations in America know a great deal more about than we do in this country—is to have some...

The number of birds to an acre of ground varies from one season of the year to another. governed by migration, the amount of food available as the result of cultivation, and the...

keepers to dig out two terriers trapped below ground, mentioned in my newspaper, reminded me a little of experiences of my own when I possessed a ferret called Charlie, a little...

6d.) THE MULBERRY BUSH. By Angus Wilson. (Seeker and Warburg, 10s. 6d.) READING Angus Wilson's play makes it easier to understand why it had so mixed a reception when the...

last issue, the description and price of two books, 7'he Kersten Memoirs by Felix Kersten, and Victorian Vinaigrette by Ursula Bloom, were transposed. The price of the former is...

hydrangeas, the ambition of most People who plant them in their gardens. Too much lime is, I believe, the reason for this, although the same applies in very acid ground. If one...

BY PHILIDOR LARSEN No. 42. IL A. K. BLACK (12 men) WRITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's problem by Mosely: R-K 2 waiting. 1 . ....

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT NEXT week the Treasury will publish the annual Economic Survey. It is really monstrous that the public, who are constantly being lectured on matters of...

By CUSTOS THE rally in the equity share markets which started last week has gathered strength for various reasons. First, it is thought that Mr. Macmillan has already fired his...

SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 316 Report by J. M. Cohen La nuit, dans le silence en noir de nos demeures, Be quilles et batons, qui se cognent, la-bas: Montant et devalant les...

ACROSS 1 This Miss Fecksniff might have ripe (6). 4 I sue a cat for her (8). 10 Associated with Rowena by Thackeray (7). 11 Hasten to the valley and get landed, so to speak...

WILLIAMS, I Harborough Road, Oxford, and MR. 11. M. PALMER, 36 Church Road. Roby, Liverpool.

and Khrushchev, produces 'The Not-so-young Visiters.' A prize of £5 is offered for on extract from this work. Limit, 150 words. Entries, addressed 'Spectator Competition No....