nsibly, the massive demonstration ned for this coming Sunday is being 4 nised' by an 'ad hoc committee' of vari- fringe organisations, headed by the so- ea 'Vietnam Solidarity...

Three weeks ago, after Mr Wilson had opened his 'fighting come-back' speech at the Labour party conference at Blackpool with a gratuitous sneer at the BBC, the common reaction...

Forty-nine Labour Members of Parliament voted against the Government after the Prime Minister had reported to the Commons about his negotiations with Mr Ian Smith aboard HMS...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH At the beginning of the 'Tiger'-`Fearless' adven- ture serial, Mr Wilson thought that he risked four ministerial resignations as the price of...

AMERICA JOHN GRAHAM Washington—It is just no good hoping that George Wallace will go away. A great many Americans, notably the officials of the Demo- cratic and Republican...

CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1918-1968 ELIZABETH WISKEMANN Next Monday, 28 October, be the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the first Czechoslovak Republic. For thirty years now...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY The Maxwell-Carr story has been told so often in the last few days there is absolutely no need for it to be told again. Which should be sufficient warning...

STUDENTS IAN Ma cGREGOR This is the second of three articles by a senior university teacher. It is said in America at the moment that the outcome of the presidential election...

J. W. M. THOMPSON This has been National Mosley Week, it would appear. How unbelievable all the fuss of recent days would have seemed only a few years ago. We have had the full...

Com- mission on International Coinage has presented its report, which amounts in brief to this: things must be let alone. An international coinage is impossible, unless we alter...

PERSONAL COLUMN COLIN MacINNES Comedians art rare who delight succeeding generations. Bud Flanagan charmed audiences for forty years, and came to be a kind of Comic Elder...

PUNDITRY KENNETH ALLSOP A devastating attack on the failure of Parlia- ment to bridge the gap between our legislators and the public was delivered last night by Mr Hedgehog...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD It was an ironical coincidence that, at the very moment when Richard Crossman in his Granada lecture was asking for an hour's television on some serious...

MEDICINE JOHN ROWAN WILSON The British Medical Association has never been able to decide how much part it ought to take in popular health education. On the one hand, it feels...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN Since .I wrote on the Ulster problem last week, it has become evident that the Ulster govern- ment is, for the moment, battening down the hatches, that...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS Though Ulster Loyalists may be True subjects of Her Majesty, Yet in this Londonderry air A little oddly they declare They'll see hell freeze if Britain dares...

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER The Oxford Chair of Poetry, now prematurely vacant by the resignation of Edmund Blunden, is the oldest, and was for long the only literary chair in Britain....

JOHN BETJEMAN Wyndham and Children First Lord Egremont (Macmillan 36s) This is an extraordinary and entertaining book. Much of it is about politics, economics, mili- tary...

• JOHN HOLLOWAY Edward Lear Angus Davidson (John Murray 35s) At heart, we are all Stracheyites about the Victorians. Perhaps it is through being daunted by their sound...

PATRICK COLLINSON John Knox Jasper Ridley (oup 60s) When John Knox was in the last year of his life and physically already a broken man, the force with which he could still...

ROBERT HUGHES Artists sometimes produce works which are prophetic to the point of self-parody; one of these was an ink-and-crayon drawing Henry Moore made in 1942, which was...

- MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH George Eliot : A Biography Gordon S. Haight (ot.n. 55s) Professor Haight's exhaustive new biography of George Eliot can do nothing but bring both readers...

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER The Kate Greenaway Treasury edited by Edward Ernest (Collins 42s) 'Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls Of water, sheets of summer glass, The long divine...

ANNE SEXTON This is the desk I sit at and this is the desk where I love you too much and this is the typewriter that sits before me where yesterday only your body sat before...

KENNETH ALLSOP Drop Out! Robin Farquharson (Blond 25s) In 1955 Warden Sparrow was called from high table to the telephone. On the line was Robin Farquharson, a young candidate...

RONALD HINGLEY The Heart of a Dog Mikhail Bulgakov trans- lated by Michael Glenny (Collins and Harvill, London 21s) Heart of a Dog is a short novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the...

Brief candles BARRY COLE The Heart Keeper Francoise Sagan translated by Robert Westhoff (John Murray 21s) I Am Mary Dunne Brian Moore (Cape 25s) The Twelve Days of Christmas...

SIMON RAVEN A Compass Error Sybille Bedford (Collins 25s) F1aAa, seventeen' years old, is living alone on the 'South CoaSt of France near a little fishing port to whiCh no...

LUDOVIC- KENNEDY KCB, DSO, OBE, DSC (Cassell 50s) The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 David Irving (Cassell 42s) We do not lack information on the life and times of Sir_ Winston...

PENELOPE HOUSTON Hitchcock Francois Truffaut with the col- laboration of Helen G. Scott (Seeker and Warburg 105s) 'The public was being given the great privilege of embracing...

LORD EGREMONT The Living Village Paul Jennings (Hodder and Stoughton 30s, 35s after 1 December) This book is a picture of rural life drawn from village scrapbooks. Most of it...

The Poetical Books (ouP Vols 1-3 63s each) illustrated foible PAUL GRINKE The Oxford University Press are obviously rather pleased with themselves for thinking up the novel...

Face savers PENELOPE HOUSTON Faces (Academy One, 'X') Barbarella (Paramount and Plaza, 'X') Hot Millions (Ritz, V') Eight years ago, John Cassavetes directed the remarkable...

HILARY SPURLING The English theatre has seldom been noted for looks, indeed more for signal failures in this line than for conspicuous success, but we have at present two...

OPERA CHARLES REID On the way to the Coliseum for the Sadler's Wells production of The Italian Girl in Algiers, I remembered jeeping through shell-rubbled outskirts into the...

ART BRYAN ROBERTSON There's not much around the galleries this week to set your actual aesthete's house on fire, but two independent blazes have been started: one by an English...

NICHOLAS DAVENPORT At the Mansion House feast last week—I wonder how much is spent each year on official guzzling in the City of London!—the Chancel- lor of the Exchequer...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL Last Friday, the day upon which I recom- mended British Petroleum at 103s 3d as a good gamble on the possibility of finding oil in Alaska, the company...

CHRISTOPHER FILDES My tenure of office, now I come to look back on it, has been one damn takeover after another. Some have been bigger and more important than that for the News...

INDUSTRY GEORGE MICHAEL Who cares about small companies? Well, small companies do—passionately. But nobody else seems to give them a proper thought. The Government, when it...

CUSTOS The equity market has been moving uneasily. The sharp slide half-way through the month gave investors a nasty moment, and is too recent a memory to be ignored. It is not...

SILVER FLORENCE PLACE It's the devil to polish, but we still use a silver coffee pot for breakfast,' a banker friend told me recently over dinner. 'We had it valued just after...

Brunton (Letters, 20 September) both take heart, and apply to the Six Counties (where Shakespeare's pronunciation arrived with the Plantation of Ulster in 1608 and still...

poodle' in your 18 October number. Is it not time this foolish fashion of calling people 'poodles' was discontinued? It is not only offensive to those it is intended to insult...

Sir: Few admitted 'strong' Zionists are as honest, or as engaging, as Professor Brogan (18 October), but I wonder whether any other racial or religious group would get his...

in support of Sir Denis Brogan's splendid 'Table Talk' (11 October)? Firstly, it can hardly be stressed too often that even now many of the 'guilty men' in the West who sup-...

Sir: May I reply briefly to the 'technical' points raised by Mr Peter Jay, when arguing against import controls, ,t1though 1 agree with Mr Robert Skidelsky (Letters, 18 October)...

LETTERS From Sir Herbert Marchant, Robert H. Doug- las, J. M. Jefferson, L. E. Weidberg, the Rev Douglas Graham, Vernon Bogdanor, Archie Gordon, A. M. Burdon-Cooper, Angus...

Sir: It is perhaps appropriate that an academic, who is not a 'professional friend of Africa,' should make some comment on Tibor Szamuely's glowing review of Professor An-...

Sir: Had your reviewer been able to list all the slips in Professor Mack Smith's History of Sicily he might have mentioned also the mis- takes about Vincenzo Florio of whom he...

Sicily and the review (4 October) en- titled, appropriately, 'Slips showing.' I am not sure whether to attribute Professor Mack Smith's statement that 'the English wine...

Bousfield Wished to be rude (Letters, 11 October), he succeeded very poliiel} But as G. K. Chesterton said, there are no un- interesting things, only uninterested people . 'What...

Sir : Lady de Zulueta (Letters, 18 October) is sure I have been fair to the late Sir Malcolm Sargent, according to my lights; thinks I didn't know my subject very - well (I met...

Sir : As we have been publicly invited to accept guidance from the classics, would it not be well to take a more comprehensive view? Unlike others I make no claim to be a...

Sir: Col. Strix should count the blessings of his bureaucrats (18 October). Postcodes, I guess, are to be occupant-group personalised. We at Stinkwort Cottage are labelled RG9...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS Do you see that face at the bar there? Look! Now, as he turns his head: The one with the mouth turned downwards and the eyes that are glazed and dead....

Trevor Grove reports: Competitors were given ten words chosen from the opening lines of a well-known play and asked to construct round them part of the script for a play, film,...

COMPETITION Competitors are invited to use the ten following words taken from the opening passages of a well-known work of literature, in the order given, to construct part of...

PHILIDOR Black White II men C. J. R. Sammelius (3rd Prize, Sverdlovsk, 1964/66). White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 409 (Guidelli): K -...

Across 1 What, pawn the family favourites, the darlings? (7) 5 Negotiated the primrose path presumably (7) 9■ Johnny the bull-fighter of Allington (5) 10 Scotsman concealing...