The traumatic events of the last week—the high point of which was the Chancellor of the Exchequer's admission t hat a single newspaper article could trigger off yet another...

Not for the first time the House of Lords incurred the wrath of the Government. For discharging its constitutional functions, the second chamber was threatened with abolition by...

Crime in high places John Grigg At the beginning of 1956 Britain's prestige in the world was still astonishingly high_ Put of all proportion to the country's material...

In Newcastle for a by-election, I am struck once more by the uncomradely backbiting of local Labour politicians. The renowned 'Mr Newcastle', T. Dan Smith, made a tape recording...

Strange state of the Left Auberon Waugh Mr Frank Allaun (Salford East, Lab) asked the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to make a statement on the outcome of his...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington You can be no more confident about which candidate is going to win this election now than when the two of them were nominated last summer. The...

Xan Smiley Geneva The only point on which the six teams at the Rhodesian conference so far agree—and with a comradely warmth lacking in other matters is that Genevois beer is...

Patrick Marn ham Malaria is in the news again with the announcement that a safe vaccine may shortly be developed. For nearly fifty years the white man has had little to fear...

Anthony Holden El Ayoun, Western Sahara Hassan II, King of Morocco, plays golf off a ha ndicap of eight. As he powers his way around the private links attached to each of his...

Ian Bradley Students are used to being wooed by life insurance salesmen and libertarian socialists. They are about to receive overtures from a rather different source. During...

In Baden-Baden Peter Paterson If the Institute of Directors and the Townswomen's Guild were to combine for a charabane outing to Toy Town the effect would be s omething like...

Christopher Booker 'The art of statesmanship' observed John Bright, 'consists as much in foreseeing as in doing'. I have thought of this admirable dictum on two occasions in...

Richard West When Lord Lucan vanished after murdering his wife's nanny, his circle of friends from the Clermont gaming club became the object of curiosity to the public, press...

Elisabeth Dunn In the days before we had a National Health Service, medical attention was for people who could afford it. Now that our health service is the envy of the western...

Line-shooting Jeffrey Bernard Back to my favourite course last week, Newbury. It was the first time I'd seen them pop over the sticks since last spring and if jumpers lack a...

Mugging the Old Lady Nicholas Davenport Mugging the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, who usually carries some £4 billion Pounds in her 'reserve' pouch, is a dastardly Crime...

Sir: Doubtless Mr Harold Macmillan had his own reasons for emerging from retirement for a tedious half-hour to give a kick in the teeth to the party he once led. He did not,...

Sir: The article you printed by Mr Theodoracopulos about Greece is much more revealing of the author's irrational phobias than it is of anything remotely like Greece . today. Mr...

Sir: With reference to your correspondent Auberon Waugh's article in the Spectator of 23 October, I would like to point out that it is not for reasons of poverty that 1 no...

Sir: It is unfortunate that Richard West's bias allows him to damn the work of public relations practitioners without consideration for the many people who have had reason to...

how much I enjoyed Richard West's exposé of the role of PR function (16 October). I must say it almost fooled me— I thought when I started to read it that it was a serious...

Sir: Stuart Holland is really ungenerous to Mussolini in suggesting in his article 'Keynes and the Labour Party' (16 October) that Keynes had 'more influence on postwar British...

The historian as archivist Robert Skidelsky Winston S. Churchill: Vol. 5, 1922-1939 Martin Gilbert (Heinemann £8.50) have never found Winston Churchill the most interesting...

Peter Conrad A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Bart. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Macmillan £4.95) Princes and Artists: Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts...

Robert Blake The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Vol. III, 1834-41 Edited by Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University Press £18.80) The third volume of this excellently...

Nick Totton Sleep It Off Lady Jean Rhys (Andre Deutsch £2.95) The Rainbow Pearl Buck (Eyre Methuen £3.25) Noughts and Crosses Helen Muir (Duckworth 0.45) Sleep It Off Lady is...

Benny Green A , Ragged Schooling Robert Roberts ( Manchester University Press £3.75) Be it ever so humble, there's no place like C hildhood, where the grown-ups stride the...

Olivia Manning Try Anything Once Raymond Mortimer (Hamish Hamilton £6.95) I doubt whether Raymond Mortimer's friends did him much service when they persuaded him to reprint...

Ronald Hingley Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage Amanda Haight (Oxford University Press £5.50) As more and more information becomes available on the Soviet period of Russian...

Anthony Burgess Essays from the World of Music and More Essays from the World of Mus ic , Ernest Newman (John Calder £6.50 an u £7.50) A literary education teaches you nothing...

Two plays and last words Kenneth Hurren Time rapidly runs out. Nearly all the sand is in the bottom half of the whatsit, and the nervous frivolities that sometimes have passed...

Sex parable Clancy Sigal The way Eric Rohmer has shot Die Marquise von 0. . (Gala, A certificate) implores us to look beneath its stunningly photographed surface for 'moral'...

Erotic combat Jan Murray The Royal Ballet must have been shaken by its exposure to Japan last year. Following Jack Carter's derivative Shukumei for the company's touring wing,...

Indian alibi John McEwen Sacred Circles (Hayward Gallery till 16 January) is the last of the bicentennial exhibitions: 2000 years of North American Indian art. The use of the...

Wexford ho! Rodney Milnes President 0 Dalaigh's last official act before resignation was to open the twenty-fifth Wexford Festival Opera. The citizenry naturally felt that...

Two Harolds Richard Ingrams The appearance on the box last week of those two great entertainers, the two Harolds —Macmillan and Wilson—provoked many strange reflections. Could...