In any House of Commons row over procedure there is a lWays a good deal that is spurious. The rules of the House are both ancient and obscure. Their willing interpreters are...

The British ambassador to Ireland, Mr Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was murdered by a land-mine planted outside his official r esidence near Dublin. His secretary, who Was travelling...

John Grigg Now that Roy Jenkins's impending move to Brussels has been officially confirmed, the question of his successor as Home Secretary is of immediate and topical...

If Mr Heath would like to establish a good r elationship with Mrs Thatcher he will have t ° do better than he did in the last issue of the Sunday Express in an article of...

Auberon Waugh In the Spectator of 6 March this year I printed an eloquent—but unheeded—plea to the Queen for a free pardon and state pension to be granted to Mr Albert...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington There's a joke going around here that, with his perfervid Baptist convictions, Jimmy Carter had no need to select a vice-presidential running...

Anthony Lejeune When I first visited Rhodesia fourteen years ago I described Salisbury as looking like a mixture of Welwyn Garden City and any mid-Western town—with just a...

Philip Norman I was standing on the Paton Bridge, one of the several causeways which cross the 13 . nieper into Kiev. I had been admiring the view over the broad waterway with...

C. P. Snow 'Bulgarian Atrocities'. Nowadays this country wouldn't be stirred by any such item of news, about Bulgaria or anywhere else: but it was different a hundred years...

Patrick Marnham Corruption, like espionage, goes on all the time. Whenever a spy is caught there is a great outcry about 'a collapse of security' instead of the satisfaction...

Stephen Glover The General Synod of the Church of England, like the Church Assembly before is a conservative institution. Last week's Synod at York was opened by Dr Stuart...

Christopher Booker As someone who, over the past four years, has kept a certain eye on property developers, housing, planning and local government, I was particularly interested...

Andrew Alexander Political 'guess-who-said-that' games can be diverting and, occasionally, rewarding. The diligent can come up with quotations showing Churchill in favour of...

Elisabeth Dunn The habits of the scorpion are mythical. The habits of the consumer society are fact. It is widely, though not conclusively, held that the scorpion, when it gets...

Sir: Brigadier Calvert's reputation as a. soldier adds weight to the views expressed in his letter in your 17 July issue: but does he expect us to believe those shabby and...

Sir : The current intention to wipe out CSE and GCE examinations and replace them by a single common examination must alarm many people in and out of the universities. Scholars...

Sir: I much enjoyed Shirley Robin Letwin's excellent piece 'Democracy and Free Enterprise' in your 3 July issue. At last, thank God, a capitalist, private enterprise, free trade...

ink and ingenuity has been devoted these fifty years to writing that the Liberal Party is not worth writing about. Glad you are in the swim. I'm only wondering, sir, just why...

Sir; The allegations by Sydney Norgate (Letters, 10 July) are of course nonsense and display a complete misunderstanding of the present two-tier postal system. This was...

numbers ere the numbers came before droning on to become what Jacques Chirac would call 'un des bavards d'Europe', I was naturally very interested in the article (10 July) by...

Sir: As an American (and a Democrat who Will reluctantly vote for James E. Carter on 2 November), [should like to take issue with Nicholas von Hoffman (10 July) on several...

Sir : 'The measure of union responsibility for unemployment and economic stagnation is common ground between pseudoKeynesians and imputed-monetarists' writes Sir Keith Joseph...

Sir : Benny Green (in his review of John Rowe Townsend's Written for Children on 10 July) says: 'I remain as puzzled as ever by the refusal of scholars of children's literature...

MS . Celia Haddon. A doyenne of hockey stars—Miss Marjorie Pollard—has found advertisements in issues of the Hockey Field, dated,25 October 1906 and 26 October 1905, which refer...

Hilary Spurling Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography Winifred Germ n (Oxford University Press £5.75) It is now more than twenty years since Winifred Gerin moved to Haworth and set...

Peter Conrad Speak for England Melvyn Bragg (Secker and Warburg £5.50) Much as Melvyn Bragg disclaims art, e lectronically eavesdropping on the reminiscences of the villagers...

Patrick Cosg rave Weizmann: Last of the Patriarchs Barnet Litvinoff (Hodder and Stoughton £5.95) Late in the nineteenth century a dandified Hungarian-born journalist, Theodore...

Charles Marowitz Post-War British Theatre John Elsom (Routledge and Kegan Paul E3.95) The rise of the New Wave some years after the Second World War is one of the great events...

Richard Shone The Naughty Nineties Angus Wilson (Eyre Methuen £3.95) Aubrey Beardsley and His World Brigid Brophy (Thames and Hudson £3.50) One of Toulouse-Lautrec's most...

Benny Green Conversations with Cardus Robin Daniels (Gollancz £5.95) Anyone who ever met Sir Neville Cardus will know that he was profligate with his conversational gifts, and...

MA CUISINE by A. Escoffier, English translation by Vyvyan Holland (Paul Hamlyn 1965). THE PLEASURES OF THE TABLE by Sir Francis Colchester-Wemyss..THE TENTH MUSE by Sir Harry...

Harriet Waugh Hotel de Dream Emma Tennant (Gollancz £3.95) Hounds of Spring Julian Fane (Hamish Hamilton £3.95) In Emma Tennant's new novel, Hotel de Dream, the forces of...

All the city's a stage Christine Brooke-Rose Paris It has been a curiously mongrel season in the Paris theatre this year. There have been fewer French classics than usual, and...

Rodney Milnes The collaboration between Edward Bond and Hans Werner Henze on a commission from the Royal Opera could hardly fail to be stimulating, provocative infuriating,...

0 Canada Ian Cameron French Canadian movies do not, on the Whole, get a very warm welcome in this country. The few that arrive here are dutifully reviewed with the lack of...

John McEwen Bridget . _ exhibition at the Rowan (till 22 July) is her first strow of new paintings to be seen in London since 1969. The 'sixties were wonderful years for Riley...

Hans Keller Schoenberg first married the daughter of Alexander von Zemlinsky, who turned from his teacher into his pupil in no time; after his first wife died, he married the...

Kenneth Hurren Weapons of Happiness (Lyttelton) The Devil's Disciple (Aldwych) The White Devil (Old Vic) Donkeys' Years (Globe) 'I served the Communist Party for seven...

Forget it Jeffrey Bernard I think I might lose a friend here. Well, maybe not exactly a friend, but certainly a something between an acquaintance and a friend. I've known Akin...