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Vietnam and the President
The SpectatorMeanwhile, Mr Johnson's decision to with dr 1 ,'lw from the presidential contest does give "nil a freedom of manoeuvre which he could not otherwise have had. He may not be able...
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An example to Mr Wilson
The SpectatorGetting on for two hundred years ago, Lord George Gordon (of the Gordon riots) delivered his verdict on the political situa- tion of the day : 'The Government has lost the...
PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The SpectatorMr Johnson astonished everyone by announcing that he did not choose to run for President in 1968; and those who do so choose are running very much harder. First off the mark was...
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Mark two of the beast
The SpectatorPOLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH It needs someone with Mr Crossman's infallible common touch to know that what the country is yearning for above everything else at the...
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Whatever next?
The SpectatorAMERICA MURRAY KEMPTON New York—Mr Johnson's departure is the final evidence that the game of political commentary is up for the indefinite future. The explanation of an event...
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Marching away from communism
The SpectatorCZECHOSLOVAKIA TIBOR SZAMUELY For forty-five years now the critics have been arguing about whether that immortal literary hero, the good soldier Schweik, was actually a...
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One more river
The SpectatorMIDDLE EAST-1 DAVID PRYCE-JONES Amman—In the streets of Amman now the members of the Fatah, the resistance move- ment dedicated to reconquering Israel, are in evidence as never...
Russia plays it cool
The SpectatorMIDDLE EAST-2 DEV MURARKA Moscow—Consolidate and diversify : this is the spirit in which Soviet diplomacy is dealing with the supercharged atmosphere of the Middle East. The...
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The General and the world
The SpectatorPATRICK COSGRAVE 'Things fall apart,' Yeats wrote, 'The centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.' In the last few weeks that description has seemed more than...
New momentum
The SpectatorCHRISTOPHER HOLLIS `What had been an orderly and disciplined demonstration changed momentum when a yogi decided to stand on his head at the corner of Downing Street.'—The...
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Safety first
The SpectatorPAROLE GILES PLAYFAIR The much-vaunted parole system, intended, we were assured, as a bold assault on the hitherto intractable problem of overcrowding in prisons, came into...
A hundred years ago
The SpectatorFrom the 'Spectator'. 4 April 1868—It ought to be an offence for Members of Parliament to end a great division on Friday night. What is the use of Parliament except to furnish...
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SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
The SpectatorNIGEL LAWSON Thoughtful Germans have never taken parlia- mentary democracy for granted. Although the present experiment has lasted longer and been infinitely more successful...
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On the literary life
The SpectatorPERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON The writing of fiction, regarded as an occupa- tion, bears certain resemblances to prostitution. It is a career open to the talents, which can...
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Loan campaign
The SpectatorEDUCATION STUART MACLURE With the National Union of Students in session at Leicester University this weekend, the air will be rent with wild and provocative talk of student...
New MPs for old
The SpectatorPARLIAMENTARY REFORM JOCK HUGHES-HALLETT Admiral Hughes-Hallett was a junior minister in the last Conservative administration. For a great many years the House of Commons has...
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Silence in court
The SpectatorTHE LAW R. A. CLINE There is not much doubt that something went wrong at Leeds Assizes and the Lord Chief Justice has now in effect said so. 'The facts will out' is not enough;...
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Down to earth
The SpectatorSCIENCE PETER J. SMITH There is something delightfully amusing in the thought of the majesty of Parliament being brought to bear on the inevitability of nature. When, some time...
Manny at arms
The SpectatorTHE PRESS BILL GRUNDY Freedom may prove to be no more indivisible than the atom, but it is at least arguable that if all those particles had linked arms a bit more firmly we...
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Golden Gate
The SpectatorTABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN San Francisco—I went from the St Francis Hotel to a drug store (it called itself a phar- macy) at 8.30 a.m. It was shut, thus confirming my belief that...
Wheeler deal
The SpectatorCONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN When Gwen Raverat's American mother visited Cambridge, England, for the first time in the spring of 1883 she wrote home, 'I am at last at the...
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Scroobious Mr Lear BOOKS
The SpectatorPAUL GRINKE Philip Hofer's Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman (Oxford University Press 70s) is the first serious attempt to take Edward Lear at his own valuation as a...
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'Savage wasp
The SpectatorMORDECAI RICHLER Black Power Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (Cape 30s) Much as I hate to admit it, it's not the decent people in the middle, rather the white bigots...
Sinister stance
The SpectatorGORONWY REES Editor Kingsley Martin (Hutchinson 42s) The Left Review : October 1934-May 1938 (Cass, eight volumes, £48) I greatly enjoyed Father Figures, the first volume of...
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Studies in scarlet
The SpectatorRONALD HINGLEY Red Prelude: a Biography of Zhelyabov David Footman (Barrie and Rockliff 25s) Tolstoy Henri Troyat (W. H. Allen 84s) The Bridge and the Abyss: the Troubled...
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Diddler diddled
The SpectatorROBERT HUGHES Cagliostro Francois Ribadeau Dumas (Allen and Unwin 50s) A few weeks ago, Count Cagliostro's silver shoe-buckles, engraved with zodiacal emblems, made £80 at...
Tigers Are Better-Looking, with a selection from The Left Bank
The SpectatorJean Rhys (Deutsch 25s) Bitter-sweet RAYNER HEPPENSTALL A thing I notice annually is that when, come Christmas, regular reviewers and stray celebri- ties tell us in the...
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Shorter notices
The SpectatorDouble Diploma : The life of Sir Pierson Dixon, don and diplomat Piers Dixon (Hutch- inson 55s). Mr Dixon has produced another in the line of unexceptional biographies of ex-...
Crackers
The SpectatorD. C. WATT Recent studies from the United States, in par- ticular Mrs Wohlstetter's examination of Pearl Harbour and Professor Klaus Knorr's article on the Cuban missile...
Things like dogs
The SpectatorHAGIWARA Translated from the Japanese by Graeme Wilson Things like dogs, by barking; by becoming Deformed children, things like geese; Things, by shining in the night, like...
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Enter a Free Man (St Martin's)
The SpectatorTHEATRE Invisible man HILARY SPURLING Tom Stoppard is a curious phenomenon. Last year we had his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which, by an ingenious twist,...
Hepworth at the Tate ARTS
The SpectatorBRYAN ROBERTSON The Hepworth show at the Tate is one of the grand occasions in the art life of this country: awe-inspiring as a retrospective survey of a lifetinie's...
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CINEMA
The SpectatorSporting move . PENELOPE HOUSTON Hugs and Kisses (Paris-Pullman, 'X') Arguments on •the more theoretical operations of censorship are liable to break down in out- bursts of...
Amazing tract
The SpectatorTELEVISION STUART HOOD I must confess that I take up a pamphlet called A Christian Approach to Television (Church Information Service 2s 6d) with considerable suspicion. As the...
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Government and business
The SpectatorHAROLD LEVER, MP Harold' Lever is Financial Secretary to the Treaility. The psoblem the businessman has tt$ live with is thatfoday the government makes the market or...
The economics of masochism After the Budget A 14-page financial
The Spectatorsurvey IA1N MACLEOD, MP lain Mackod is Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr Jenkins is the vogue. If he had stood up on budget day and recited the list of trains arriving...
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Do we want Great Britain Ltd?
The SpectatorF. A. BISHOP F. A. Bishop, after a civil service career in which he was principal private secretary to two Prime Ministers, deputy secretary to the Cabinet, and permanent,...
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Bankers face the challenge
The SpectatorGEORGE BOLTON Sir George Bolton, chairman of the Bank of London and South America, has just retired from the Court of the Bank of England. This year 1968 is already certain to...
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Thee flight from savings
The SpectatorCHRISTOPHER FILDES This year and last seem already to have found their place in the economic history books: `1967-68: the Flight from Money.' The books will point to the steep...
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The third industrial power
The SpectatorNICHOLAS DAVENPORT So President Johnson has finally decided that he cannot destroy the communist forces of North Vietnam without destroying the morale and unity of the United...
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Equal and opposite
The SpectatorFINANCE USA WILLIAM JANEWAY The past week has witnessed the most dramatic demonstration imaginable of the current and prospective nature of the relationship between Washington...
Promising flop
The SpectatorPORTFOLIO JOHN BULL I have decided to invest in the biggest flop of the year—the f40 million Greater London Council loan at 7} per cent. Issued last week on very tight terms,...
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Market report
The SpectatorCUSTOS The pace was too hot to hold; and the stock market has been falling back from the record levels attained last week. The Financial Times index, 442 at the close of...
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After the hangings ...
The SpectatorSir: Having just read Sir Alec Douglas-Home's article in your issue of 15 March (`After the hangings, what now?'), could I just mention that there is one non-racial country left...
Why I wouldn't become an MP
The SpectatorSir: Mr Peter J. Smith (1 March) has it right only up to a point. His idea of an appointive- cum-elective House of Commons is no bad one. But it would not cure the basic malady...
A written constitution?
The SpectatorLETTERS From Anthony Lewis, Leslie Bilsby, Anna M. B. Moore, Allan Hale, Roderick L. Badams, Gilbert H. Archdale, Rear-Admiral C. H. S. Wise, FtN (Reid.), 'A Young Athenian,'...
Building a community
The SpectatorSir: We were delighted when you commissioned Messrs Donnison, Pilcher and Waddilove to write on housing (29 December), and again now to find Neil Wates—in the `Business view-...
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Cricket trad and mod
The SpectatorSir: Though my theological persuasion is that which would normally be called 'fundamentalist' and is thus far away from the movement to- wards unity with the Anglican church, I...
Dealing with the Wen
The SpectatorSir : In 'Spectator's Notebook' (8 March) Mr. Thompson suggests that the pressures caused by population growth in this country give us only two alternatives—'total immersion in...
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Who's backing the colonels?
The SpectatorSir : In the letter from 'An Old Athenian' to the SPECTATOR of 22 March, which is indeed confused beyond measure, there is a sentence revealing in a perfectly clear way the...
Castro feels the pinch
The SpectatorSir: I have read the article in your issue of 29 March in which Lord Walston gives a roseate picture of Cuba, speaks of the evil done to that country by the sugar millionaires,...
Absent friends
The SpectatorSir : It may be that the worthy critic, Mr Henry Tube, in the SPECTATOR of 22 March, has never heard of either Strindberg or Ibsen—which might, possibly, account for the...
Pensioner's dole
The SpectatorSir: The SPECTATOR appears to be one of the few publications willing to give an airing to a possible injustice being done to a minority group without voting influence. I would,...
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The good food guy
The SpectatorAFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS Colonel Chamois Loon, who left the Ministry of Defence last year after sensational revelations about government snooping had been made in a daily...
No. 495: Paper chase
The SpectatorCOMPETITION 'The most controversial, most unpredictable, most liked and disliked of all modern politi- cians,' George Brown no less, described in the Sunday Times, 31 March,...
No. 493: The winners
The SpectatorTrevor Grove reports: Competitors were asked to concoct examples of 'opening sentence one- upmanship' in the style of a real or imagined critic of the arts. Thackeray's...
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Chess no. 381
The SpectatorPHILIDOR White Black 12 men 8 men M. Parthasarthy (1st Prize, Probleemblad, 1966) White to play and mate in two moves; solution next week. Solution to no. 380 (Driver): Q - K...
Crossword no.1320
The SpectatorAcross 1 Part of a novel musical combination (12) 8 Chamber music that comes to nought? (9) 9 Nothing with crab for this bean! (5) 11 Otherwise softwood makes up a trial (6) 12...