' Prance', said Andre Malraux, 'is like a cat: it always falls its feet.' In beating off the most formidable challenge that the Gaullist regime has yet faced, the cat has fallen...

Waiting for Fred Ferdinand Mount Godot and Blucher were not more eagerly waited for than the report of the Select Committee on Race Relations. The report was in reality a...

It seems almost unbelievable that next Week, after the longest-drawn-out retireMent ceremony in history, Mr Jack Jones Will finally cease to be the General Secretary of the...

Face to face Auberon Waugh In a week overshadowed for many by the death of Douglas Woodruff, at eighty, the retirement of Mrs Jane Tarr from the headpersonship of Kingston St...

Edward Mortimer Here we go again. Israel has occupied another piece of territory belonging to ec nIrse, no territorial ambitions in the area another of her Arab neighbours. She...

Christopher Matthews Rome Unfortunately, it's hard not to admire the Red Brigades. The first shock has long worn off: a pale-faced newscaster, who should have been introducing...

George Hutchinson The death sentence imposed on Mr Bhutto, !he former Prime Minister (previously President) of Pakistan, might perhaps be accepted as a just verdict, an...

Christine Verity In June 1976, a probation officer named Kenneth Kavanagh saw that the current issue of Gay News, displayed on the bookstall at St Pancras Station, contained an...

Vernon Bogdanor 'Fortunately,' declared Wilde's Lady Bracknell, 'in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever'. She would have found confirmation of her...

peter Paterson Jack Jones slipped quietly out of his role as s Word-bearer to the Labour Government last week with a visit to Buckingham Palace to receive his CH and have a...

Duncan Fallowell So it is done. The maverick syndicate which supplied over half the world with its LSD requirements has been smashed. This hermetic chemical has been wiped off...

Bear or bull? Nicholas Davenport Easter is a good time to look at the behaviour of our share portfolios. It has been disappointing to see the bull macket dry up, the FT index...

an old Europe' (18 March), bY mentioning states outside the Community which, if it is kept 'sufficiently flexible', maY be attracted to it. Europe ends neither at the Pyrenees...

Sir: Mr J. Heal (11 March) suggests that newly arrived settlers in Britain should dis card their customary dress, as apparentlY this would make them appear more British , and...

Sir: Since most public law cases involve cow flicts between state interests, including moral welfare and the preservation of lav . / and order, and individual interests, which...

Sir: The government-appointed Committee of Inquiry into the engineering profession, of which I am chairman, is anxious to conduct an analysis of the distribution and deployment...

Sir: In his appreciative and most thoughtful summing up of Hardy (11 March), Christopher Booker does not mention one metaphysical watershed in Western history, the publication...

Sir: Poor Richard Ingrams! I am sorry he is so offended (4 March) by nasty homosexuals being allowed on television. After all, there are only about three million homosexuals in...

Sir: Having just caught the British Museum's exhibition of eighteenth-century French landscapes I am still puzzled by your reviewer's denunciation of these artists for their...

Sir: I wonder if anyone else has been struck with the horrid suspicion that one of the main reasons for delivering all those Russians into the embrace of that great and good man...

Sir: Jeffrey Bernard's reference to 'torpedo-shaped tits' of the 'fifties brought back very happy memories. As an enthusiastic exponent of this now dated female weaponry, I...

Secular Maggiolatry George Gale Margaret Thatcher: A Tory and Her Party Patrick Cosgrave (Hutchinson £5.50) At the beginning of his account of his leader, employer,...

Max Egremont E.M. Forster; A Life (vols I & II) P.N. Furbank (Secker & Warburg £6.50 and 2 7.50) The second volume of P. N. Furbank's life of E. M. Forster begins in 1914 with...

Ronald Hingley The ivankiad Vladimir Voinovich, translated by David Lapeza (Cape £3.95). Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps Robert Conquest (Macmillan £6.95) The USSR versus Dr...

Francis King Madder Music Peter de Vries (Gollancz £3.95) The Throwback Tom Sharpe (Secker and Warburg £4.50) Freud, as Peter de Vries reminds the reader in Madder Music,...

Triumphs Auberon Waugh More Roman than Rome Derek Holmes (Burns & Oates £8.50) One of the effects of the French Revolution was to bring about a revival of the Catholic...

Alan Gibson Sitting in Judgement Ulrich Simon, (SPCK £3.50) Ulrich Simon was born in Berlin, a Jew. His family were comfortably off, and had become Christians, though not...

Mary Kenny The Friar of San Giovanni: Tales of Padre Pio John McCaffery (Darton, Longman & Todd £3.95) Miracles do happen. The power of prayer is amazing. For example, last...

On to the world's end Rodney Milnes Elektra (Welsh National Opera) The Seraglio (Kent Opera) Seraglio (Scottish Opera) As far as I know, the Greeks of early fifteenth-century...

Heroin heroine - red Whitehead W ithdrawal Symptoms (ICA) The Interview arid The Examination kfilrnost Free) A c, Play with a title like Withdrawal ' Proms, set in a drug...

Conspiring Clancy Sigal Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Odeon Leicester Square) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (A) lets me bow out of this column on an upbeat note....

Boredom Richard Ingrams My ancient television set which makes the picture shrink the longer it is kept switched on has developed a strange new habit. You turn it on and after...