W HEN a film has been taken of a crash in the course of a motor race, it often seems when the film is shown in slow motion that the car has suffered no damage. For some seconds...

SPECTATOR ESTABLISHED 1828 - NUMBER 6719 - FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 1957 - PRICE NINEPENCE

By DARSIE GILLIE !,? Paris PTIFIE most lovely early spring of many years will I greet the Queen when she comes to France next week. Too early, indeed, for some of its joys to...

AN uneasy breathing-space has been secured in the engineering and shipbuilding disputes, and for all the blustering of Mr. Ted Hill and the'insidious 'manoeuvrings of Mr. Frank...

By IAN GILMOUR unz made the Left , feel young again. Instead Oct dreary wrangles about the block vote and interminable squabbling over what is and what isn't Socialism, they...

SIR ANTHONY EDEN made grievous errors of judge- ment. He was a sick man goaded beyond endurance by another sick man who even when well must be maddening to deal with—Mr. Dulles....

Still, short of Lord Salisbury nipping round to Buckingham Palace and explaining that when he said 'Macmillan' what he really meant was 'Butler' (`The names are so alike,...

At home the resignation of Lord Salisbury has seemed to put a spark of life into the Government, and the post-Bermuda debate which should have been a sitting bird for the...

BUDGET CURTAIN RAISER GIVES WARNING Economic survey holds out little hope of cuts. Evening Standard, April 2. THINGS ARE LOOKING UP We may get tax reliefs A - cautiously...

Public Relations Officer of London Trans- port, made in his letter last week that the only sensible way of calculating a fare is on the dis- tance to be travelled. But I still...

(like that of his big brother the poet, it seemed to grow with age) that his re-creations of it on canvas became 'positively three-dimensional, so sumptuously would he pile on...

absence in America will be glad to hear that life over there has not curbed his natural ebullience. Perhaps the writers of 'Talk of the Town' in the New Yorker will forgive me...

his decision to resign on a disagreement over policy—the first Conservative Cabinet Minister to do so since Duff Cooper in 1938, and I am glad to have been proved wrong in my...

Field-Marshal's 'blatant honesty.' My dic- tionary defines 'blatant' as 'offensively noisy,' ` clamorous,' loud,"loud-voiced,"brawling' and `obtrusive.' Hmm . . . * * *

its tendency to hide from issues until it feels the coast is clear. There have been a number of ex- amples lately—the Shops Bill, for one; and one of the most glaring came last...

DI ERTRAND RUSSELL, a man venerated by my generation of Americans, has lately been writing a good deal of nonsense about the United States. The tone has been unerringly hostile....

Joyce Cary should have occurred in the same week that saw promise of a change in the out- moded laws governing obscenity in books. Both as a practising novelist and as a person...

House of Commons on Monday, said : • believe that the action which we took then has given an important impetus to the plans to make us less dependent in future on existing means...

By MICHAEL JOSEPH rr WENTY-ONE years ago I started a publishing 1 business. My qualifications did not amount to much—a few years' editorial and publishing experience, some...

By DESMOND DONNELLY, MP M R. MACMILLAN prepared the last Budget under the shadow of Gladstone's portrait— if he wants to succeed, the next Labour Chan- cellor had better frame...

By ANGUS MAUDE, MP o far the Government has shown no signs of a being about to drop the Shops Bill. This may be due simply to a desire to keep the House of Lords innocently...

When I was young and naughty, I said to myself, said I : 'If I live to the age of forty 'Twill be time for me to die. `For a man he is old at forty And the silver cord is...

Anger By ROBERT HANCOCK R. JOHN OSBORNE, the author of that very successful play Look Back in Anger, was at home when I called at teatime one gloomy Sunday. There was no...

to the Editor of the Field in November, 1934, 'that had a quarter of the existing evidence for the Loch Ness Mon- ffter been available' for the presence of some rare animal in a...

By LESLIE ADRIAN ITIHERE is quiet jubilation just now in that I epicure world of soft green carpets and morning coats, the grocery department of Fort- num and Mason in...

mental hospital I should like to express agreement in general with the views expressed by Mr. Kenneth Robinson in your issue of March 22. In twelve years I have worked in six...

SIR,—Mr. Robert Blake in his article on Keir Hardie in your issue of March 22 states that : 'Keir Hardie believed passionately in the class war, and he felt a real personal...

of Strix as I am? In your issue of March 29 he wastes an unconscion- able amount of your good space with a fussy, nig- gling, atrabiliar dissection of some probably harmless...

Mental Dealt hntanship Kenneth Robinson, MP, P. D. Pike, Hanno Keir Hardie Henry Pefling Strix Robert Waterhouse Taper and Berkeley Taper Fair Deal for the Clergy Rev. Victor...

much less than Dr. Donald John- son's and similar to my own, both having been London insurance brokers and the sons of doctors in Lancashire. But even these qualifications...

Euston 3221

enjoyed, by and large, his review of Miss Rowena Farre's Seal Morning. But, Sir, how can he write of 'the . . . innate laziness of the born Highlander'? We have, since the...

SIR,—I am anxious to obtain for the benefit of an American friend information relating, to the life of Amelia (Byam) who was said to have been married in October, 1836, to John...

my remarks in this paper; But Berkeley despite, MPs do fade from sight 'Neath the gaze of Yours faithfully, TAPER

SIR,—The leading article In your issue of March 29 on 'Doctors' Pay' agrees with the majority of in- formed comment in placing the blame for the present dispute between doctors...

SIR,—I did not wish to depreciate the great leaders of the past and I would agree with Mr. Lilley that the good man will make his mark. Have not London men like Drs. W. R....

SIR,—As a Highlander by ancestry, birth and language (an Englishman by affection) I take emphatic exception to Mr. Jack Schwab when he writes of the 'melancholy mysticism and...

SIR,—I would like to correct a remark made by Mary McLean in your issue of March 2 regarding homing pigeons returning to base by means of telepathic communication with the mate...

FRANCIS BACON has previously derived pictures from the Velasquez portrait of Innocent X and from the death mask of William Blake; his present exhibition at the Hanover Gal-...

Petrushka . . . pro and con REVIVALS of theatrical works tell us much more about the state of taste in the period of revival than they do about the quality of, and atmosphere...

State Your Case differs from most cash-and-carry programmes both in structure and in appeal. Instead of being decked out like a vast pin-table alley with score- N 0 boards,...

Two tired, famous faces against an extravagant backcloth—that is The Monte Carlo , Story, a film with the soufflé lightness that needs almost magical handling if it is to,...

Fin de Partie. By Samuel THE successor of Waiting for Godpt and All that Fall is, if anything, even more depressant than those two despairing tours de force. The scene is a...

Anglo-Saxon Platitudes By KINGSLEY AMIS D ECIDING which is the most boring long poem in English is, even given the existence of Piers Plowman, by no means an easy task. If the...

-in Mr. Duveen's story of his clan and its rise to riches in the world of antique and art dealing. There are family troubles, of course, but in this case they take the form of...

`How many divisions has the Pope?' asked the late Joseph Stalin on one celebrated occasion. The answer is that in terms of the ideological struggles which have rent Europe in...

the Middle East to India, and three of them describe their adven- tures. Scrappy, vigorous, it ranges from historical research on Indian sculpture to an interesting but far too...

a nobly , born Moslem educated at Oxford, speaking a kind of Esperanto of sophistication, and able to meet on personal— not journalistic—terms almost anyone he cares to call on...

to describe, unless you A Train to Tarragona, by Anthony Carson (Methuen, 15s.): difficult to describe, unless you know Mr. Carson already; this is far more than a straight...

A MIXED bag of travel books differ 'as much in method and presentation as in subject. Here are all sorts of countries, but the authors and their attitudes vary quite as much as...

chirpy account of a motor-cycle trip to Spain by a breezy professional travel-writer who has written at least twenty similar-sounding books, with titles like Pedalling Poland,...

describes, with most historical emphasis, a leisurely journey along the Rhine taken by a middle-aged, serious, and agreeable traveller and his daughter. Unexciting but pleasant...

25s.): spirited and near-scholarly account of life in Malta by a seasoned Mediterranean traveller who now lives on Gozo, the smaller of the islands; spoilt at times by a...

25s.): exploration, old style. This is a diary kept by Colonel (then Captain) Bailey on an historic free-lance expedition to Tibet in 1913, which won the Royal Geographical...

Unwin, 21s.): exploration without talent. This book shows just how dull a trip round the world can become. Three Danes and a cat called Isa Lei go round it in a fifty-year-old...

A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822. By Henry Kissinger. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 36s.) No one who looks at history can imagine, as...

by necessity. An im- mensely tough and resourceful man, the author was one of several who escaped from British in- ternment in India during the last war. On his second attempt...

ROMMEL is said to have described the Western Desert as a 'tactician's paradise and quarter- master's nightmare.' The British Army, too, re- gards deserts as militarily 'U'; they...

WHo made the first flight across the English Chan- nel, and when? Bleriot—about 1909? Ha? One good reason for reading First Flights is the amount of money you can win on one of...

Lord Lovat of the '45. By Moray McLaren. (Jarrolds, 18s.) THIS is not a biography' but a long, garrulous plea in extenuation of Lord Lovat, the famous 'Fox of the North' who...

6d.) Murder in the Paris where .good Americans go to when, they die-the Paris of the Deux Magots and existentialist night clubs, in one of which such places murder happens, and...

another kidnapping-an unusually brilliant, lucid and almost documentary account, in this case, of how American practi- tioners might snatch a child, and how the FBI might set...

feuds and ancient wrongs are the mainsprings of murder in a North-Italian tnountain village, most alluringly described. Mr. Rutherford writes an admirably economical, well-bred...

The Hitler I Knew. By Otto Dietrich. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. (Methuen, 18s.) ' Orro DIETRICH is unique among the Hit- lerographers in that he had a front-seat...

Other universities have had their laureates-if laureates, in this particular literary field, is the word-why not Edinburgh with murder taking place at a riotous Rectorial? Miss...

6d.) Another similar, and similarly gripping, talc of pretty blackmailer's mysterious murder, not perhaps put together with quite such dazzling technical skill as Mr. Ransome's...

6d.) Remarkably exciting, per- suasive, cross between.science fiction and thriller, of highly superior H. G. Wells-ish sort, in which a group of scientists learn to suspect that...

Henry Wade's neo-Trollopean prose has a stately tread, like an old-fashioned policeman's, and it is old-fashioned policemen; admirably and admiringly characterised, who solve...

6d.) The last crime story from the late Max Murray's pen, alas, (there is a straight novel still to come) is a pretty slight affair set in an English village, but a heroine who...

Top Secret. By Leonard Halliday. (Hammond, Hammond, 10s. 6d.) The first thriller, surely, to have as hero a former Manchester Guardian reporter is suitably well-written, and...

very good, bloodless, English tale of a kidnapping, by a rather livelier writer than Mr. Wade. Andrew, Garve has been a reporter in his time, and a good one, and his background...

10s. 6d.) Two apparently purpose- less and apparently unrelated killings on the side- walks of New York lead to unfolding of ingenious crime that had led only inadvertently to...

I s. 6d.) Inordinately ingenious and complicated story of how blackmailing trollop is bumped off and practically every inhabitant of small Florida pleasure-beach town is...

12s. 6d.) This almost octogenarian old master knows how to construct and elucidate a plot, and his genteel prose paces sedately through the 'maze of smuggling, black- mail and...

A Mortal Patch. By Vernon Scannell. (Villiers Publications, 7s. 6d.) 'ILLUSTRIOUS vernacular'—thus Mr. Holloway splendidly and accurately describes the language he looks for in...

I, Libertine. By Frederick R. Ewing. (Michael Joseph, 10s. 6d.) AMONG the brightest and best of the novelists to make their first appearance in the year after the war was...

The English Woman in History. By Doris Mary Stenton. (Allen and Unwin, 35s.) MEN in England for so long (though perhaps a little less blatantly than elsewhere) appropriated for...

The Indivisible Island. By Frank Gallagher. (Gollancz, 21s.) IRELAND has been partitioned for rather more than thirty-five years. Ten years earlier such a sever- ance would...

By IAN NIALL KISSING is not in season, the old saying runs, when the gorse is not in bloom. This being the time when the young man's fancy fondly turns to thoughts of love, it...

The mystery of the gravel mounds, about which I wrote a short time ago, is not confined to Hamp- shire, where the trouble was reported. An Edinburgh reader remarks on a like...

By PHILIDOR No. 96. M. LIPTON (Die Schwalbe, Sept. 1955) BLACK (3 men) ti WHITE (12 men) WHITE to play and mate in two moves: solution next week. Solution to last week's...

in Wales, it is reported. This is not by any means a new agricultural process. Silage towers are, in fact, almost as much part of the rural landscape in some places as Dutch...

APRIL 7, 1832 FROM Sze-chuen we hear that thirty-three vagabond lawyers, who stir up litigations, have been taken into custody, and arc forthwith to be punished.

Good marrows are only grown on a well-prepare0 bed and the best way to enrich ground for marrows, when manure is scarce, is to dig into it, in good time, as much lawn-mowing...

have written Gray's Elegy than taken Quebec. For the usual prize of six guineas com- petitors are asked to devise three equally improb- able preferences by •distinguished...

ACROSS 1 'I deeply ,' said the Walrus (10). 1 We hear the money is hidden here (4). ) A little glutton makes a somewhat tardy re- appearance (5). Where Ruth stood in tears is...

SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. 370 e More and more merchant ships fly the flags of unnautical nations and we read that Liberian tanker tonnage now exceeds Great Britain's. Taxation...

By CUSTOS THE stock markets stood up better than was expected to the darkening strike news and were quick to re- cover at thefirst sign of the light breaking through the...

By NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THE first effect of the strikes on the City of London was to cause a mad scramble for industrial equity shares as an inflation hedge. Certainly no one in...