Life without the General 'They will return to the delights of anarchy.' - Such was the forecast which General de :IL Gaulle used to offer with relish to those who ' asked him...

It was apt that Captain O'Neill should have chosen to resign on the same day as General de Gaulle. Each had staked his fate on a gambler's appeal to the ballot box—and each...

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH The question whether, Labour is or is not fit to govern may be largely academic nowa- days—as we all know, our economic affairs have been...

FRANCE MARC ULLMANN Paris—On Monday afternoon, shortly after three o'clock, M Alain Poher drove into the forecourt of the Elys6e Palace preceded by the presidential motor-cycle...

General de Gaulle resigned as President of France and Capt O'Neill as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. The first two candidates for the French Presidency to declare...

AMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON New York—The student rebellion brings out only infrequently the best in the young and all too frequently the worst in the middle-aged. There is much...

NORTHERN IRELAND JAMES SIMPSON Belfast—At the time of writing the selection of Northern Ireland's next Prime Minister seems to be poised on a knife-edge, with Mr Faulkner...

CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS 'The direction of the school is in the hands of a ruling class monopoly.'—Reader in Sociology at London School of Economics. Oh, what a crab and curse it is...

CHINA DICK WILSON The ninth congress of the Chinese Communist party, the first to have been held for eleven years and which has now ended, has confirmed the intricate power...

J. W. M. THOMPSON Parliament seldom seems to shine when dis- cussing questions of privilege. After the Speaker had ruled that a Select Committee's disorderly visit to Essex...

PERSONAL COLUMN J. H. PLUMB The Senate House in flames: mobs roaring and rioting in the Forum, full of hate, hungry for blood: off they went looting and pillaging: confronted...

TELEVISION STUART HOOD 'By the mid-'seventies, television will be a uni- versal medium able to go wherever man and machine can take it and report anything the electronic eye...

THE PRESS BILL GRUNDY I shouldn't imagine Mr Robert Maxwell is anybody's favourite man, except possibly Mr Maxwell's, but I simply cannot resist admir- ing his stamina. Beaten...

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN By some accident which I cannot now account for, on 18 June 1940 it was suggested to me that I should phone a French officer whose name suggested...

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER Machiavelli was born in 1469 and his 500th birthday seems a good opportunity (says Mr Anglo in his new book on Machiavelli,* pub- lished this week) to take 'a...

ROBERT BLAKE All who met him would ag*e that Walter Monckton was a man of great charm and most pleasing personality. He probably made fewer enemies than anyone else in recent...

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 42s) There is something of the storyteller in Tom Wolfe and something of the sociological critic, but there...

Talks programme BARRY COLE A Place in the Country Sarah Gainham (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 30s) The Pornographers Akiyuki Nozaka trans- lated- by Michael Gallagher (Secker and...

Narrator's eye HENRY TUBE The Worldwide Machine Paolo Volponi trans- lated by Belen Sevareid (Calder and Boyars 35s) The Faithful Nancy E. Kline (Peter Owen 32s) The Tunnel...

STUART HOOD Writers in Arms Frederick R. Benson (Uni- versity of London Press 60s) Writers in Arms is the first of a -series of studies.in comparative literature to be produced...

PATRICK ANDERSON The Endless Steppe Esther Hautzig (Hamish Hamilton 21s) Southern Adventure Konstantin Paustovsky (Collins 30s) The Crane Bag Robert Graves (Cassell 42s)...

ELIZABETH WISKEMANN Europe 1919-45 R. A. C. Parker (VVeidenfeld and Nicolson 63s) - Mr Parker has a fresh, terse, paradoxical approach to the history of Europe between 1919 and...

NORMAN COLLINS Birds of Asia A. Rutgers illustrated from the lithographs of John Gould (Methuen 72s) This interesting hybrid, embodying the charac- teristic features of both...

The R.I.B.A. Drawing Series (Country Life . and Paul Hamlyn lOs 6d each). The RIBA COP iection of architectural drawings is a vast and all too little-known repository of...

100s). A. V. Miller's new translation offers an admirable alternative to the two- volume edition by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, published in 1929.

HILARY SPURLING The Theatre Behind the Gate from Prague, which reached the Aldwych last Monday, was founded in 1965 by five stern and, in artistic terms at least, desperate...

Cold snaps PENELOPE HOUSTON They Came to Rob Las Vegas (ABC general release, 'A') I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (Warner, 'X') The first shot of They Came to Rob Las Vegas is one...

BALLET CLEMENT CRISP As these words appear, Necterlands Dans Theater's visit to Sadler's Wells is drawing to a close; for anyone interested in ballet in the 'sixties—and to...

ART BRYAN ROBERTSON Another essential exhibition in Oxford: after Tim Scott's sculpture at the Modern Museum, a sizeable group of Bridget Riley's drawings, 1961 to 1967, at the...

Across 1 Border firework (6) 4 The dry ones of the poetic quartet (8) 8 Windsor wooer (8) 10 Poetic Elizabeth (6) 12 German eating place? (5) 13 'Fly fishing may be a very...

MONEY NICHOLAS DAVENPORT De Gaulle retiring for good to Colombey-les deux-Eglises, Chancellor Jenkins flying off to Washington to see the Secretary of the us Treasury, the £...

CUSTOS Here we are in the middle of a currency crisis once more. Herr Strauss is talking of a possible German mark revaluation of between 8 per cent and 10 per cent and...

PORTFOLIO JOHN BULL Despite pre-publication nerves (following some beautifully wrong Sunday newspaper re- ports), the Monopolies Commission report on beer can cause little...

LETTERS From Dr Israel Shahak, Geoffrey Somerset' Dame Ngaio Marsh, Mrs Elfrida EstcoUri. P. 1. Wilde. Dr N. R. Sengupta, Sir Frederic Bennett, MP, Graham E. Hubbard,...

Sir: Of course we know what Dr Mishan (Letters, 4 April) is driving at, among other things—that magical sound barrier; and no one who has read his brilliant, and timely. book,...

Sir: As an English graduate of a co-educational American university which had, nevertheless, separate halls of residence, I view with horror the notion (Letters, 4, 11, 18 and...

'How shall we find the Concorde of this dis- cord?' (A Midsummer Night's Dream, v. 1.) Ngaio Marsh Marton, 37 Valley Road, Christchurch 2, New Zealand

4 and 18 April) and of Mr Jackson (Letters, 11 and 25 April) with great interest, and in the substance of the debate, whether standards of morality are to be chosen by the...

From the 'Spectator, 1 May I869—The Directors of the Imperial Gas Company have issued a report upon the defalcations of Benjamin Higgs, their clerk on £145 a year, who has...

Sir: In 'Spectator's notebook' (25 April) Mr Thompson makes a fundamentally invalid analogy in his defence of the Third Programme on grounds of freedom of choice. While it is...

Sir: Tibor Szamuely (14 February), compar- ing Russia and China, remarks that China, unlike Russia, was not expansionist in the past and has not pursued expansionist policies...

Sir : With reference to Mr Martin Seymour- Smith's review of the Cowden Clarke book (25 April), I wonder if, it -wou14 , be of interest to give Keats's fascinating vignette of...

Sir: Is Mr Lasky (Letters, 25 April) quite serious? I suppose so. I fear so. He writes of the 'exploitative manipulation' by which the Establishment drives large numbers of...

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS As that golden age of the late twentieth cen- tury glowed into its iridescent climax, loud with the insistent thrumming of deep-bellied guitars and the...

Sir: The Treasury Knights have all got Ks And keys to an ivory tower And they sit at ease and jingle their keys In a large black Humber car. Their policy lies in pieces, Their...

Sir: Stephen Gardiner (18 April) is entitled to denigrate his own country as much as he likes, but he should get his facts right first. `Since the French have discovered that...

Sir: What has Miss Olivia Manning done to throw Maurice Capitanchik this way? His piece about her novel The Play ROOM (11 April) seems to show a lack of judgment. I read and...

Trevor Grove reports: An apposite quote from Belloc's famous weepie, 'Lord Lundy,' indi- cated to readers that the Dear Old Butler who figures in that poem was a figure of...

PHILIDOR Black 10 men 11 men L. I. Loshinski and L. 1. Zagoryuko (third prize, USSR 1968). White to play and mate in three moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 436...

COMPETITION It has just been announced that seventeen previ- ously unpublished short stories by the late Somerset Maugham, written over sixty years ago, are to be published in...