AST week's working-class revolt in the Polish town of Poznan seems to have followed fairly closely the pattern of the East German rebellion of 1953. There, too, what began as a...

EXT week the House of Lords will debate on second read- 1V1 The second argument that is without validity is one based on the small number of MPs voting on both sides during the...

put up by the Opposition to open the economic debate, Conservatives realised that they were safe. Once again the Opposition had been provided with a big occasion; once again...

• By RICHARD A FEW weeks ago, the cover of Time, `The Weekly Newsmagazine,' was graced with the agreeable likeness of Jacques Barzun, a staggeringly erudite Columbia professor...

rTI HE main event of this week has been the outbreak of 1 serious rioting in the Polish town of Poznan, where an international trade fair was being held at the time. This sign...

BY CHARLES CURRAN I WANT to draw attention to a political portent. It is a new book called Twentieth Century Socialism* which has been produced by Socialist Union—the group of...

I SUPPOSE THAT there are a good many of us who are prepared to reach for our guns when we hear the word 'culture.' There is something especially chilling about official literary...

of 'virgin birth,' I obviously overrated the importance of the medical tests performed on the mother and child in question. My guess was that the successful grafting of skin...

that there would be no increase in railway fares (although as a taxpayer I knew pretty well that what I gained on the fares swing I should lose on the subsidy roundabout). But...

a long rambling street occupied mainly by miners and their families. At one end, housed in a prominent building, stands the Labour Club—the windows of which look straight across

between the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science and representatives of the organisations in Britain and the US which support it. The intention is to review...

BY CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS I HAVE recently been rereading Kim, and what a good story—or perhaps one should rather say, what a good panorama—it is. Its two faults are obvious enough,...

BY BORIS FORD F OR some ten years now Mr. David Webster, the General Administrator of the Royal Opera House, has been staggering manfully about the Garden, trying to balance his...

BY J. GRIMOND, MP RE we, in politics, going the way. of France? The sus- picion must have struck many people besides myself. From time to time it is fanned by some incident or...

specifically concerned in this book with the subject of Capital Punishment; but the question of its aboli- tion must surely be related to the conditions involved in the...

BY JOHN BETJEMAN I HAD always heard that Fulham Palace was rather a dull house. 1 suppose this was because I had always heard about it from clergymen and they rarely like...

JULY 9, 1831 THE French elections commenced on Tuesday. We described them last week as already commenced; a proof, as a Brighton contemporary pleasantly remarks, of our early...

I DO not understand about finance, and I never shall. You have only got to see me paying a taxi-driver to divine that there must be something amiss in my relations with Mammon....

The Dead Sea Scrolls John Allegro The Casement Diaries .Rene MacColl, Peter Singleton-Gates `Women in Antiquity' The Ven. A. Earle Political Philosophy J. N. W. Watkins A Poet...

of Mr. Rend MacColl and myself. For examples in the art of evasion your correspondent Mr. Cullen should study the answers of successive Home Secretaries when questioned about...

SIR, —Mr. Tom Cullen's line of argument con- cerning Mr. Singleton-Gates, myself and the Official Secrets Act reminds me of the classic story of the foreign correspondent whose...

by Virginia Graham of Women in Antiquity by Charles Seltman. The review seems to me to be a complete distortion of historical fact and balance. Take this: . . up to the...

Euston 3221

SIR,—Your correspondent Mr. T. U. Taylor, in writing of Robert Southwell, inspires me to a similar essay in the emotive use of language. That lovely character Ignatius of...

endured sufferings and met their death for the sake of their deeply rooted con- victions, not least some of the Roman Catholic missionaries in different parts of the world. But...

of religious and political groups to the denigration of one another's martyrs is still going strong. First Mr. Evelyn Waugh sneers at the Marian martyrs for heretic cranks, then...

I should be grateful if you would allow me to establish several practical points arising from Strix's review of my book The Reluctant Legionnaire. 1. I do not consider I...

Profes- sor Oakeshott's inaugural lecture as 'a wily defence of the shabby against the new' I meant by `shabby' time-worn' and not, as one reader supposed, 'underhand'?—Yours...

SIR,—As Trustees for the copyrights of Dylan Thomas (appointed by his widow) we wish to make as complete a collection as possible of the texts of his letters. May we, therefore,...

Psychodramatics ( ARDS OF IDRNTITY. By Nigel Dennis. (Royal COMO—NIGHT OF THE FOURTH. By Jack Racy and Gordon Harbord. (Westminster.) 'I III. lirSI act is unusually promising....

ANY Picasso exhibition these days, such as , the magnificent show of his graphic work at the Arts Council, is bound to look to some eyes a little old-fashioned, for the values...

Ar the end of my television stint (and with the Mediterranean around the corner) geniality seeps through the critical membrane; you try to remember the peaks, to forget the...

THE Aldeburgh Festival differs from other post-war festivals in its strong religious emphasis. Nor is its religious character similar to that of those old-established choral...

TRAPEZE. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) IN Trapeze Sir Carol Reed has (I feel tempted to say, at last) directed a film that will, I suspect, be in both senses popular. Not, per- haps,...

A Literary Humanist BY PETER QUENNELL S INCE Baudelaire first announced, in his essay on the genius of Wagner, that every real poet must inevitably become a critic, and that a...

BY CHRISTOPHER HILL T HE English squirearchy, Dr. Wingfield-Stratford tells us,* brings out the worst prejudices of .historians. Senti- mentalists treat "the old English squire"...

THE GERMAN NOVEL : STUDIES. By Roy Pascal. (Manchester University Press, 30s.) EXCEPT for Werther, with its seedy sentiment and brilliant self- pity, and Wilhelm Meister, that...

Tim CENTRAL BLUE. By Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor. (Cassell, 30s.) THE war and post-war years were no respecters of persons. Who in, say, September, 1938,...

UNTIL fairly recently a majority of travellers in the less sophisticated regions of Africa could be said to merit Swift's jibe against some of the culture-sellers of his day: So...

MINOS OR MINOTAUR? By John Bowle. (Cape, 15s.) Mos - r of the present advocates of a world order ruled by a world government fall into either of two classes. One set of writers,...

A HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES. By Joan Evans. (The Society of Antiquaries, 35s.) THE first pages of the first minute book of the Society of Antiquaries of London,...

ADVENTURES IN PARADISE. By Willard Price. (Heinemann, 21s.) THE SEVEN LITTLE SISTERS. By William Willis. (Hutchinson, 16s.) south-west corner of Asia Minor. But, as admirers of...

THE stage Welshman—feckless, emotional, equivocating, poetic, gifted with the gab—is an endearing enough personage, and those of his compatriots who act it up a little in real...

A HISTORY OF EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 476-911. By Margaret Deanesly. (Methuen, 30s.) TODAY, when so many of the assumptions of European civilisa- tion are under fire, it is...

TIME AND PLACE. By George Scott. (Staples, 16s.) MR. GEORGE SCOTT puts himself forward as a representative of a newly developing social class, the class of the talented young...

THE ENGLISHNESS OF ENGLISH ART. By Nikolaus Pevsner. (Architectural Press, 16s.) LORENZO LOTTO: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS. By Bernard Beren- son. (Phaidon Press, 63s.) RAPHAEL. By...

ABOUT this time of the year the Mediterranean, which, during our eight-month winter, might as well have been Baffin Bay for all we cared, comes suddenly to life. It is the...

THE LETTERS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA. Edited by Daniel Cory. (Constable, 50s.) SANTAYANA was among the least obtrusive, yet most determined, in the recent colonisation of Europe by...

FRANCE 1940-1955. By Alexander Werth. (Robert Hale, 35s.) IN spite of the title, this successor to its author's numerous books on the decline and fall of the Third Republic can...

ONE unlooked-for effect of the numerous American novels attacking the political witch-hunters may be a feeling with English readers that things can't be so bad as all that....

LANCASHIRE AND ITS COTTON By James Nowen EDWARD WHyMPER: MOUNTAINEER, WRITER, ARTLYT, AND SCIENTIST By Robert Whymper THE BIBLE IN CHURCH By The Very Rev E. G. Selwyn, D.D....

VICTOR MACLURE calls himself a gourmand at large—'gourmet,' he feels, is too finicky a description. Good Appetite My Companion tOdhams, 15s.) is part-autobiography,...

BY NICHOLAS DAVENPORT THE increasing distrust of British industrial shares which the investor is now showing and his growing affection (or passion) for oil shares are both...

By CUSTOS THERE has been enough bad ,news to push the bear market farther down its course— unemployment spreading in the motor trade, new Australian import cuts, threats of...

BY IAN NIALL FOR some reason sheep-shearing on the moun- tain was later than usual this year. Perhaps it was a question of the availability of all the labour at the right time....

V. WILSON (2nd Prize, Ameriesui Chezz . Bidledni1955) BLACK (4 men) iplAy and This problem is taken from The Problemist of May, 1956, a magazine I can warmly recom- mend to...

To honour the occasion of Bernard Shaw's centenary on July 26 this year, com- petitors are invited to compose a dialogue of not more than 150 words between G. B. S. and St....

Competitors were presented with two prose lines which had accidentally assumed a pentametric verse form, and invited to cotnpose a sonnet, or up to 14 lines of blank verse or...

ACROSS 1 Here's a chance to mob a lot (7). 5 Is it held, therefore, that eleven are incapable? (7) 9 Bound together, the league showed the way (7). 10 The fairy has deserted...