The World at War (repeat) M rs Thatcher went on a five-day visit to the Soviet Union. She had lengthy talks with Mr Gorbachev and luncheon with Dr Sakharov. Dining one night at...

Ferdinand Mount writes: David Watt was killed when he picked up a fallen power cable during the storms last weekend. With his tragic death at the age of 55, we have lost not...

AMERICA WON'T BUY IT M r Kinnock and Mr Healey would love to be able to explain away the slapstick, into which their Washington visit collapsed, by in effect asking the voters:...

Mrs Thatcher, Mr Gorbachev and the people in between FERD INAND MOU NT Berlin h ehe East German equivalent of News- night is presented by the sort of good- looking, alert man...

F or politicians today the phrase 'good on television' is equivalent to 'good in bed' as used a generation or so ago. Indeed, as the now unfashionable linguistic philo- sophers...

The bolshie bishop fights the bottle AUBERON WAUGH S ome years ago I was reading my copy of Somerset Farmer, the organ of the Somerset Branch of the National Farmers Union,...

On the fifth anniversary of the invasion why the Foreign Office was deceived THE FRANKS Committee has matured with age. Five years have now passed since the events which led to...

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on the Labour leader's incomprehension of how to present Britain in America Washington `YOU don't go abroad and then rubbish your own country and Prime...

Adam Nicolson on the trials of a segmented existence on US airwaves WE HAD recorded about half an hour's conversation. It had gone pretty well, I thought, dwelling on a few...

Michael Trend examines the assumptions behind the new way of teaching history MR KHRUSHCHEV is credited with saying, 'Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of...

Thomas Quirke on a Russian prisoner whose troubles did not end on his release THE committal of a Soviet dissident, Nikolai Baranov, to a mental hospital by a London magistrate...

Donald Trelford remembers some of the sporting heroes he has known RAY Stone would have been 50 in March. I thought of him on the day of the Scotland-Wales rugby international...

THE Committee on the defective cutlasses have reported that 'the con- verted cutlasses and cutlass sword- bayonets, pattern 1871, with which the Navy is now for the most part...

The press: Paul Johnson sees Mr Kinnock as his own executioner DID the British press do a hatchet-job on Neil Kinnock's trip to Washington? The Sunday Mirror thought so. Its...

Britain is the world's biggest loser from a kamikaze war CHRISTOPHER FILDES T he big guns open up across the Pacific, the British artillery pops away on its second front, and...

MICHAEL HAWKES, chairman of Kleinwort Benson (which, as merchant banks go, trumps Samuel Montagu) was asked this week whether ministers' tough talk would help him develop his...

SENATORS may moan and congressmen may groan, but there is one American export to which the Japanese market has remained wide open. That is paper. The Japanese have consistently...

I WONDER why the Department of Trade and Industry has left Nissan off its hit-list. Here is a Japanese company which the Department has in fact encouraged, at the public...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY - Save 15% on the Cover Price! Please enter a subscription to The Spectator I enclose my cheque for £ (Equivalent SUS & Eurocheques accepted) RATES 12...

Sir: Richard Deacon's review of Molehunt (Books, 21 March) questions the signifi- cance of the fact that not a single Soviet spy was caught by MI5 between 1953 and 1963, the...

Sir: I was deeply shocked by the scurrilous attack on Miss Celia Hammond in Alan Watkins's Diary in the Spectator of 14 March. In fact I immediately cancelled my subscription to...

related to Nobel Prizes. It is not related to education either. Some years ago a study was made of those industries in the United States which had the lowest rate of growth....

Sir: Terence Kealey has chosen an unfor- tunate time to launch his attack on Save British Science (`Science dons protest too much', 28 March), when the future of this country's...

Sir: May I be permitted to offer two factual comments on Charles Glass's article headed 'Senseless censors'? 1. He refers to Chomsky as having been `asked' by George Theiner,...

Glass's account of the attacks on Index on Censorship for pub- lishing Noam Chomsky (`Senseless cen- sors', 21 March) should follow that in which Paul Johnson, in his habitual...

Sir: Does Taki phone it in? Hemingway didn't describe Switzerland as 'more upside down than sideways' (High life, 21 March)• The reference is an article Hemingway wrote for the...

Sir: Mr J. G. Dudley (Letters, 31 January) complains that Auberon Waugh has used a word with which he, J. G. Dudley, is unfamiliar. The word, `pilgering', comes from the word...

TO MANY Christians Aids has come in the nick of time to save their crumbling faith in sexual morality. For decades now they have seen others indulge their vices with impunity....

Welshing on the Welsh Alan Watkins NYE BEVAN AND THE MIRAGE OF BRITISH SOCIALISM by John Campbell Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £15.95 B evan was called Nye by his acolytes in...

Mark Amory TAKING IT ALL IN by Pauline Kael Marion Boyars, £18.95 e only reads the reviews', people often say accusingly, 'not the books them- selves.' My position precisely...

Such sweetness of sound, such Melody just within Hearing. I try to catch The harmony, begin A statement of life and death, A concord in troubled years, The trumpet demands...

He bought her a bunch of dried flowers at the Fontaine of Vaucluse where Petrarch lived. The gesture was so unusual she felt obliged to reciprocate with ropes of shiny...

Enoch Powell on Proust and Piers Paul Read on Arnold Toynbee.

David Sexton THE POET AUDEN: A PERSONAL MEMOIR by A. L. Rowse Methuen, £9.95 T he Thirties writers have been written about far too much, thinks Dr Rowse. O nly one of the...

I look for the round words the words on ball-and-socket joints the swivelling words: gun emplacements blowing balloons and raspberries anywhichway in the wind my words are proud...

Anita Brookner TO THE CITY by Gillian Tindall Hutchinson, f9.95 J oe Beech, a London publisher, pre- pares for a skiing holiday in Austria with his family. The various forms...

Francis King A SPORT OF NATURE by Nadine Gordimer Cape, £10.95 T here are novels, some of them even masterpieces, in which the author, having set out to explore his...

Jasper Griffin MARCUS AURELIUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Anthony Birley Batsford, £19:95 M ore than 500 years after Plato made his celebrated claim that the world would never be well...

William Waldegrave THE BIRD OF TIME: THE SCIENCE AND POLITICS OF NATURE CONSERVATION by N. W. Moore CUP, f9.95 A generation of giants put in place the structure of nature...

Photography Crown and camera: The Royal Family and Photography 1842-1910 (The Queen's Gallery, till next year) A profession for royalty Simon Blow A s the Japanese tourist...

Save the drawings Gavin Stamp C ontemplating those wonderful horses above the portals of San Marco recently reinforced my belief that much talk of `cultural heritage' is...

Keith Vaughan (Austin Desmond Fine Art till 21 April) Keith Vaughan (New Grafton Gallery till 25 April) Neo - Romantic Painters (Gillian Jason till 16 April) Vaughan again...

Yerina (Cottesloe) Six Characters in Search of an Author (Olivier) Barren earth Christopher Edwards 1 7 erma is the second play of Lorca's projected trilogy 'of the Spanish...

Hidden treasure Peter Phillips D elving in libraries is perhaps not everyone's cup of tea these days. With the trend against centrally-heated buildings, like those of the BBC,...

Poetic injustice Ursula Buchan T he cause of the daffodil has not been well served by some poets. This is uninten- tional, of course, for the poet's breast appears to burn as...

Night croaking Wendy Cope Alastair Burnet had laryngitis, or some- thing very like it. Towards the beginning of News at Ten I felt sorry for him, re- membering my own days as...

Come and See ('15', Curzon Phoenix) Fatherland (`15', ICA) Worlds gone mad David Austin C ome and See is a Russian film about the second world war. It is a war of guerrilla...

Oh, Madeleine! Jeffrey Bernard anything plus listening to Norman's mum telling you how her grandfather opened the first umbrella shop in Gower Street in 1867 and on top of...

Unromantic Atlantic Taki ast Monday I was still fuming over my last Atlantic crossing, and contemplating what to do about Pan American's rudeness — they've yet to apologise —...

Good red meat Alice Thomas Ellis extract or something disgusting because he'd grown anaemic; and the human frame can adjust to a meatless diet. Mine has, more or less, but...

Orso I ALWAYS feel rather hesitant about going to Italian restaurants. This is partly because, having lived for a short while in Italy, I am painfully aware how many...

An African in the strine woodpile Auberon Waugh O nly the Australians, I iniagine, could call their wines 'Long Flat White' (1) and 'Long Flat Red' (2) — after the Hunter...

C/o Avery's of Bristol 7 Park Street, Bristol BS1 5NG Telephone: Bristol (0272) 214141 Code Price No. Value 1. 9707687F Tyrrell's Long Flat White 1986 75 cl. 12 bts. 139,96...

Boxed set Raymond Keene N igel Short won the final game of the Speed Chess Challenge at the London Hippodrome, so the full match score looked like this: London Docklands Speed...

Rhopalics (sort of) Jaspistos I n Competition No. 1465 you were asked for a poem of 10 or 12 lines in tlankish' verse in which the first line consists of four words of one,...

A first prize of £20 and two further prizes of £10 (or, for UK solvers, a copy of Chambers Dictionary, value £13.95 — ring the words 'Chambers Dictionary' above) for the first...

Each year the Boat Race, and the lead-tip to it, become increasingly remarkable. Perhaps the 1988 one will be the oddest yet. You are invited to write an account of it (both the...

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