29 JUNE 1956

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HAVING IT BOTH WAYS

The Spectator

A CCORDING to Mr. R. H. S. Crossman, the Labour Party's new housing plan is 'the most exciting thing that has happened in home politics since 1945.' Has the decade really been...

SPECTATOR

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ESTABLISHED 1828 No. 6679 FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1956 PRICE 9d.

MORE TRIVIA

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T HE Chancellor's economy measures are, of course, dis- appointing. They will give some small relief to the Exchequer this year, but they do not go further than that. They make...

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OFF THE STREETS

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R SCENT gangster activity in London has been alarming, and it culminated this week in murder. Gangs thrive on two things—betting and prostitution. The Government is going to...

CAPRICORN CONVENTION

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By a Correspondent Salisbury,'Southern Rhodesia T HE situation at the Capricorn convention in Salima. on the shores of Lake Nyasa, was summed up by a snatch of conversation...

SUMMER NUMBER

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Next week's Summer Books Number will contain articles and reviews by Kingsley Amis, Geoffrey Barraciough, Charles Curran, Glyn Daniel, Oliver Edwards, I. Grimond, MP,...

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THE MONROE DOCTRINE

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By RICHARD H. ROVERE New York M ANY odd things have gone on at hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but the announcement the other day, during a short...

GREEN TURF INTELLIGENCE

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BRIAN HEWSON, the Mitcham tailor, won one of the most dramatic miles of all time when he ran the pride of Ireland, Ronnie Delaney, deep into the green turf of the Lansdowne Road...

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'Political Cominentary,

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By HENRY FAIRLIE HE Sunday Times - this week carried a leading article on 1 the middle-class protest. At the foot .appeared the weekly text, which appeared to have been chosen...

Portrait of the Week

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W HETHER from Tonbridge tremor, or from other causes, the Government has at last been galvanised into activity, and the boards of the nationalised industries have hastened to...

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RECENTLY I WAS shown a publicity hand-out for Moral Rearmament,

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reprinted from the Daily Herald of June 4. It was the usual 'wean of self-praise for Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman by Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman, full of such stories as how he brought...

A FRIEND WHO had tea with Walter de la Mare

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recently gives me the following account of the meeting : "Now which would be better?" he said. "To know that you were to be hanged at a certain point of your life when you were...

'CONTINUING HIS GALLOPING gander at Europe, tireless Tourist Harry Truman

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returned to France and Gay Paree . . .'—not Randolph S. Churchill parodying Time, but Time itself (June 25). Whether Time is thus parodying itself or parodying Ran- dolph S....

liI II SUBSTITUTION OF a seven-day rule for a fourteen-day

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rule may be the most that can he expected from the present Parlia- ment; when even Sir Winston allows his affection for parlia- mentary `rights' to get the better of him it is...

A Spectator's Notebook

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THE Sunday Pictorial has the courage of its conviction that if stunts don't drop from heaven they can always be invented. Not in the least daunted by its previous fiasco when...

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The Death Penalty

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By ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE (Reprinted from the Spectator of January 25, 1935.) I HE present discussion of the death penalty has an importance that extends far beyond the subject...

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Dissonance in Ulster

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BY R. DOUGLAS BROWN* T HE Ulster Unionist headquarters in Belfast flies the Union Jack and has blazoned across its façade the words : 'Ulster is British.' It is the first thing...

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The Canada Cup

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BY FRANK LITTLER T HIRTY years ago Walter Hagen, playing for the first time over the august Royal Montreal, mis-hit his tee shot at a hole intersected by the railroad. When,...

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The Year of the Somme

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BY JOHN BORROW S S the sharp impression of recent events blurs into history, it becomes clearer that in spite of its magnitude, in spite of all the technical invention that it...

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City and Suburban

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BY JOHN BETJEMAN S AMUEL ROGERS said that he didn't know why, but he didn't like Shelley's poetry just as he didn't like stained glass. 1 agree with him about his first feeling...

!be 6pectator

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JULY 2, 1831 MR. PAGET (member for Leicestershire) complained of the dis- gusting discussion to which ;he Member for Dundalk had so indiscreetly given rise, as a most...

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Basil Seal Rides Again

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I N 1954 a young gentleman of means, called West de Wend Fenton, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He did not like the life, deserted, and was recaptured. His friends in...

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THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS

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Sta,—The long and interesting correspondence which has appeared in the Spectator and other publications in regard to the world-wide con- troversy about the Dead Sea Scrolls and...

KENNETH THE SOLDIER

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SIR,—I was interested to read the contribution by A. C. MacKenzie in your issue of May 25. The story of the Old Soldier is substantially correct though Mr. MacKenzie does make...

SIR,—To Roman Catholics, Father Christopher Devlin's Life of Robert Southwell

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will no doubt, as Mr. Evelyn Waugh writes, be 'a welcome addition' to the series of records of 'heroes' of the Jesuit Society. At the best, Robert Southwell was a second- rate...

A PQ ET OF THE COUNTER-

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REFORMATION SIR,—Those interested in church history will be glad to know of the new Life of Robert Southwell by Father Devlin, but on what grounds does Mr. Evelyn Waugh make...

Letters to the Editor

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The Atomic Arms Race Prof C. A. Coulson and others A Poet of the Counter-Reformation Rev. E. Benson Perkins, T. U. Tayl,» Remember Tonbridge L. A. Jackson The Dead Sea Scrolls...

REMEMBER TONBRIDGE

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Sta,—One would like to attribute Conservative sulks at Tonbridge to anger at the Govern- ment's illiberal and barren Cyprus policy, but I think you are probably right in...

99 Gower Street, London, W.C.1

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Euston 3221

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Contemporary Arts

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Second Shot THE MAN WHO KNEW Too MUCH. (Plaza.)---- GOODBYE, MY LADY. (Studio One.)— SMILEY. (Carlton.) THE trouble with Hitchcock and his formid- able reputation is that we...

THE. CASEMENT DIARIES

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S1R,—Perhaps I am being over-sensifive, but I detect something evasive in Mr. Singleton- Gates's account of the Casement diaries (June 15). First he tells us that he had...

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Summer's Sport

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As June swells into somethin g a little more like remembered summers, sport be g ins to Wrench the little screen wide open. Ascot drummed its way into my o ffi ce (and pocket)...

The Juggler

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No youn g forei g n painter has been brou g ht so insistently before the London public in the Past few years as Rebeyrolle, whose latest work can be seen at the RWS Galleries....

Gramophone Records

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(RECORDING COMPANIES: D, Decca ; DGG, Heliodor; DT, Ducretet-Thomson ; P, Philips; T, Telefunken.) To the Mussor g sky and Borodin operas performed by the Bel g rade company,...

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The Theatre and Everyman

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THE title is not promising. How not to write a Play* suggests another of those laborious facetite dredged up by humorists who have gone over to automation : a Perelman, or' a...

Soviet Ballet in Paris

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THE Chfltelet Theatre in Paris where, just forty-seven years ago, Diaghilev's revolu- tionary Ballets Russes first astonished the western world, is at the moment the home of...

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BOOKS

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What Has Become of Political Philosophy? BY J. W. N. WATKINS B RITISH politicians have become unable to state a principle. Confronted by a visiting Communist they show him over...

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Proof of the Pudding

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RE THOUGHT AND CULTURE OF THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE: An Anthology of Tudor Prose, 1481-1555. Edited by Elizabeth M. Nugent. (C.U.P., 37s. 6d.) Inc - Renaissance and Reformation,...

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GENTLY DOES IT. By Alan Hunter. (Cassell, 10s. 6d.) A

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Yard cop as competent as Chief Inspector Gently is made to appear ought to rely a little less on luck and more on good management in teaching the local police their business....

ONE MAN'S POISON. By Sebastian Fox. (Chatto and Windus, 12s.

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6d.) Poison is fed to a poisonous broadcasting literary gent; death takes place not until half-way through the book, but scene and characters are beautifully deployed, and the...

THE SLEEPING PARTNER. By Winston Graham. (Hodder and Stoughton, 12s.

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6d.) Here, too, death doesn't strike until the middle of the book, but by that time the charicters, and their possible motives for the crime that's going to happen, have been...

It's a Crime

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GENTLEMEN AT CRIME. By Donald Mackenzie. (Elek, 16s.) Fact, if not stranger than crime fiction, is, at any rate, and for once, faster and funnier. Donald Mackenzie, who was a...

MURDER IN VIENNA. By E. C. R. Lorac. (Collins, 10s.

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6d.) Workmanlike example of the guide-book kind : the author has obviously spent a few days in Vienna, and slips in, here and there, quite a bit of its rococo charm; a whiff of...

CAT. By Val Gielgud. (Collins, 10s. 6d.) Quite the best,

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so far, from this always promising, now fulfilling, author : told entirely, and necessarily, in flashback, the story of a murder that was inevitable—given the sort of man the...

THE CASE OF THE ONE-EYED WITNESS. By Erle Stanley Gardner.

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(Heinemann, 12s. 6d.) In a foreword, dedicating his book to a lecturer in forensic medicine he once sat under, Mr. Gardner reveals how 'I have been brought to a realisation that...

A COLD COMING. By Mary Kelly. (Seeker and Warburg, 12s.

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6d.) 'A Suspense Novel,' promises the dust-cover, which may have reference to those first eighteen solid pages one plods through to get to the first piece of conversation, and...

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ELLERY QUEEN'S AWARDS. Edited by Ellery Queen. (Collins, 12s. 6d.)

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Outstanding among the American contributions that make up the majority of these seventeen, generally pretty good, short stories are the James Ullman piece of detection through...

Puritans and Prudes

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1r is generally agreed, declares Miss Muriel Jaeger, that, between 1787 and 1837, the sweetness and light of the Age of Reason passed into the sombre earnestness of the...

SWEET POISON. By Mary Fitt. (Macdonald, 10s. 6d.) A man

The Spectator

who lives in the past is murdered in the present, but the ingenuity of the plot is as nothing to that of the word-making : 'susurring' is presumably the present participle of...

DEATH AND THE GENTLE BULL. By Fran6es and Ridhard Lock-

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ridge. (Hinchinson, 10s. 6d.) Urbane, literate, New York cop clears prize-winning bull of framed killing charge. Very neatly, quietly, done; and by genuine deduCtion, based on...

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Feminine Touch

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WHENEVER a young man seeks to demolish completely a person or institution there is usually someone at hand to suck a pipe-stem thoughtfully and ask him to remember that there is...

Hispania

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ROMAN SPAIN. By F. J. Wiseman. (Bell and Sons, 18s. 6d.) OLWEN BROGAN'S Roman Gaul was welcomed as the first book to give a concise account in English of the history and remains...

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New Novels JOHN HERSEY is a documentary novelist who, with

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one prosaic and one rolling eye, prods the plain facts of every day into an exotic pattern. True, his plain facts are generally in a high- coloured situation, and the flattish...

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BIRDS BY NIGHT

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'Do birds ever sing in their sleep?' asks a Hampshire reader. 'A few nights ago, lying awake about 2 a.m., I suddenly heard the song of a dunnock coming from a thick hedge a few...

THE RESEARCHERS' WORRIES

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Modern insecticides may soon have solved all the problems that farmers and gardeners would like them to, for they become more selective and positive all the time. A great deal...

BEAN STAKES

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Staking up beans is a little overdue in some places, although the lack of rain has slowed growth considerably. Some people train beans on nets, but sticks obtained from a copse...

Country Life

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BY IAN NIALL THE control of dogs on certain roads, it has turned out, is to be the worry of county authorities, and, understanding why this must be, one cannot' help but have...

Chess

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BY PHILIDOR No. 56 C. MANSFIELD (1st Prize, 'Good Companions,' 1914) BLACK (5 teen) WHITE (6 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. In the most...

UNCLES, or indeed aunts, in quest 'of a present for

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a nephew could hardly do better than invest in Regiments at a Glance, by Lieut.- Colonel Frank Wilson (Blackie, 7s. 6d.). One hundred and thirty different uniforms, 120 regi-...

Friendly Islands Six years ago a young American anthropolo- gist

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opened Mariner's Tonga. What she read in the old book made her abandon ambition and (to the dismay of her father, a businessman, who wanted her to 'get on') take a job as head-...

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SPECTATOR CROSSWORD No. 894

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ACROSS 1 Account to Apollyon for settlement (5, 2, 3). 6 Challenging shoulder badge? (4) 10 It's usually boarded up (2, 3). 11 The last straw for the Covent Garden porter...

SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 333 Set by Pibwob limply Amply explained

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to Alice the meaning of the portmanteau words in 'Jabberwocky.' A prize of six guineas is offered for a four-lined stanza containing original portmanteau words and with nod more...

It's a Date !

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Competitors were invited to compose a clerihew on any date in the calendar. Oh! My! Ever increasing Anno Domini! . If anyone hates February 23, That's me. LlEUT.-COLONEL L....

Solution on July 13 ' Solution to No. 892 on

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page 9 01 The winners of Crossword No. 892 are: Ms. II. B. DRAKE, 6 Victori. , Terrace, Seabrook, Hythe, Kent, and Mit. 13. '1. Scnrriiin . , 4t \i.,1 \ Road, Orpington, Kent.

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PROSTITUTING THE NATIONALISED COMPANY MEETINGS

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INDUSTRIES BY NICHOLAS DAVENPORT Dt.cisivr. steps are being taken, it is claimed, towards the Chancellor's 'plateau of stability.' The Central Electricity Authority has...

COMPANY NOTES

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BY CUSTOS Tim short-lived recovery in the gilt-edged market this week was technical and the same probably applies to gold shares. Oil shares—BP in particular—continue to...