N OBODY can yet say whether May 5th, 1949, will turn out to be one of the dates which European schoolboys of the future will have to learn and celebrate. The date is that of the...

The practice whereby the head of a State answers a set of questions posted to him by a correspondent is poor journalism and worse diplomacy ; as a rule it only serves to give...

The Communist armies moving on Hangchow are meeting, as was to be expected, with the minimum of effective opposition. There are so far no signs of an impending assault on the...

Only a few weeks have gone by since attention was drawn in these pages to the exceptional vulgarity with which Princess Margaret's personal life was being treated in the...

It may perhaps be a little cold-blooded to ask where Mr. Attlee's speech at Norwich last Sunday was leading. The first of May is by tradition the day on which Socialists rally,...

When Eire decided to leave the Commonwealth on Easter Day, it became a matter of urgency to ensure that no awkward consequences followed from that gesture. The Ireland Bill is...

The " black " exchange rate for sterling and dollars in France has been steadily declining in recent months until, today, British or American tourists would be ill-advised if...

" Sterling revaluation," said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking in Rome, " is neither necessary nor will it take place." Both halves of the statement are arbitrary, but...

T HE whole of Monday and Tuesday's normal hours of Parlia- • mentary business were given over to the third and fourth . days of the Report Stage of the Steel Bill. This took...

The designs for the L.C.C.'s concert hall on the South Bank were made public last week, the architects being Mr. Robert Mathew and Dr. J. L. Martin. The hall, which is expected...

T HERE was never much to be gained from the minute and prolonged examination of the situation in Berlin. The most that could be said for an arrangement whereby an enclave of...

posters in railway and Underground stations advertising a course in basic economics ; so I rang them up. " This is the School of Economics," said a female voice. I said I had...

Times last Sunday, "could leave it lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it." He was referring to an American war-book called The Naked...

climatic fluctuation. Our weather is changing and, rather luckily, it is chang- ing for the better. This process, which started about twenty years ago, has ceased to be a...

T HE policy of the Hong Kong authorities towards the Chinese Communists seems to me a very enlightened one. Consciously or unconsciously, it is based on the inescapable fact...

British public would agree with The Times, which on Tuesday launched a forthright attack on those sections of the British Press which have treated Princess Margaret's holiday as...

page, I once went flying-fish-fishing off the coral shores of that island. Flying-fish, though for some reason they will only keep for a matter of hours after they have been...

BARBADOS By FREYA STARK O NE of the best of Hans Andersen's stories tells of two children who played in the garden of dreams. They grew up and could no longer visit it freely,...

By D. R. GILLIE O N May 1st I bought from a street-vendor three postcards bearing the very beautiful feathery dove that M. Picasso designed as emblem for the Congress which...

By A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT HE music-hall comedians, desperate cartoonists and unsuccessful politicians for whom the groundnuts scheme has become a joke have forgotten...

By J. P. W. MALLALIEU, M.P. S OME people dive into the history of English folk-lore and emerge with dead fish which they try to revive on the bank. You rind them dancing,...

EDWARD MONTGOMERY New York, April 29th IF HANKS to Mr. Acheson's skilful conning, the Altantic Pact and its complementary programme of military assistance , seems, for the...

By JOHN WILLIAMS T HE Bristol Brabazon, in its present form, is a research pro- ject intended primarily to explore the problems of the practicability of the roo-ton aircraft....

THE GREEK HYMNS By JAMES M. MATTHEWS (Ballot College, Oxford) M R. MARTIN COOPER'S review in the Spectator of April 15th of the concert of Greek music given at Morley College...

By HAROLD NICOLSON 0 F the many gifts which the English possess, the most engaging to my mind is their inextinguishable optimism. The Scots, being a clear-headed race, are less...

THE City Opera Club's performance of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito on April 27th was a most spirited and in many ways an admir- able one. This Italian opera seria, written in the...

THE THEATRE The Power of Darkness. By Leo Tolstoy. English Version by Peter Glenville. ' (Lyric.) TOLSTOY was incapable of the terrible howler committed by the poet Gray when...

" The Great Gatsby." (Plaza.)—" The Kissing Bandit." (Empire.; "Tulsa." (Odeon.) Wrrx a cast headed by Mr. Alan Ladd, Miss Betty Field, Mr. Macdonald Carey, Miss Ruth Hussey,...

Two sovereign horses standing on the sand. There are no men, The men have died, the houses fallen, a thousand years' war Concludes in charnel, graves, and bones, and waves on a...

IT is a commonplace among critics that the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy, being always the same exhibition, is difficult to write about. And, of course, all the...

the Spectator of April 22nd, I can only presume that his obvious affection for the Athens regime causes him to see its plague-sores as beauty-spots. Love is notoriously blind....

BERLIN UNDER THE BLOCKADE SIR, —While I am in the fullest agreement with the conclusions of your editorial aricle Rumours from Russia in the Spectator of April 22nd, which has...

SIR,—I have read with interest Mr. Butler's account of his experiences selling clothing in a Canadian deparirnent store. The picture he presents of life in Toronto is not,...

SIR,—In the Spectator of April 29th the question, " Is the Iron Curtain pierced by radio? " was considered only so far as the Soviet Union was 'concerned. But there are ten...

Sig . .,—The Christian Church, which canonises St. Peter, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Augustine and, I believe, the penitent thief,, will never, it is to be hoped, accept De....

Sia,—Referring to Mr. Kenneth R. Day's letter under the above heading, I would suggest that there is no need for any voter to be perplexed, as the issue at the General Election...

Sth,—Is there a possibility that scrofula was not the only disease originally embraced within the genpric term of "king's evil "? In the - Grande Chronique de France, 1505,...

Sta,—In • view of the fact that legislation is being introduced to deal with the status of Eire citizens in Britain, may I draw attention to one point which has received very...

SUBSCRIPTION RATES Ordinary edition to any address in the World. 52 weeks £1 10s. Od. 26 weeks 15s. Od. Air Mail in Europe. 52 weeks £2 7s. 6d. to any Country • 26 weeks £1...

Strt,—Mr. Winter is right about one thing ; a degree is not enough. So is Mr. Schabbet ; one must wait for the good jobs. But must one wait seven years plus? Messrs. Winter and...

fertilise our fruit blossom, but an aesthetic gardener may suffer from an excess of bees. As soon as a blossom is fertilised it begins to break up. It is almost ludicrous, for...

several places of the arrival of our summer visitors, most of which have appeared pat to the average date, though some are rather late than early. In none of these.lists have I...

the tulip as Haarlem itself, we must grant that the Dutch have a supreme knowledge of the bulb; and since the bulb itself is what matters to them they are wont to destroy the...

Sut,—In his wise essay on infant prodigies, Mr. Harold Nicolson writes: " The child must not be allowed-to imagine that it is in any way superior to its less gifted...

such an august, if sometimes ignorant, body as the Ministry of Agriculture—to make cider of their small apples: The advice is unwise because the cider apple and the ordinary...

paper had the following heading: " Hospital Axe Means Less Beds." Does that mean smaller beds? Did the axe chop off the ends of the beds? It is a gloomy prospect. In the Press...

the " sleep-breaking chaffinch " quoted by Sir William Beach Thomas in the Spectator of April 22nd. We have been troubled by a pugnacious chaffinch over a period of nearly four...

IT is a seasonable pleasure to visit a part of the country where orchards prevail: We are frequently advised to visit Holland—or south Lincoln- shire—in tulip time, and very...

Tweedy is very wrong when he says, in his article 7erusalem's Fate, that " it was on the platform itself that Mohammed alighted from his mythical winged horse Burak after his...

The True Rossetti ? Dante Gabriel Rossetti : His Friends and Enemies. By Helen Rossetti Angeli. (Hamish Hamilton. 15s.) THE reader of this book can appreciate the feelings of...

Mrs. Gaskell. By Yvonne ffrench. (Home and Van Thal. 6s.) READING the best of Mrs. Gaskell is like listening to a suave music for strings and woodwind, a pastoral music whose...

Strange Defeat : A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940. By Marc Bloch. With an Introduction by Sir Maurice Powicke and Fore- word by Georges Altman. Translated from the French...

In the Green Tree. By Alun Lewis. (Allen and Unwin. 8s. 6d.) ALUM Law's was killed in an accident, in India during the war, at the age of twenty-eight. This book gives us his...

THE Restoration 'comedy of manners has been in complete dis- grace for long, and it is only within recent years that-its impudent themes have been studied critically and without...

Children Never Tell. By Gwendolen Freeman. (Allen and Unwin- 8s. 6d.) AT the age of six, Gwendolen Freeman made a vow : " I shall never forget what it is like to be a child....

The March of the Moderns. By William Gaunt. (Cape. 12s. 60 Mit. GAUNT is a brave man. Very few would attempt to write a panoramic study of art-movements from 1906 to 1930. They...

Transatlantic London. By John Evelyn Wrench. (Hutchinson. 21s.) IN Who's Who, Sir Evelyn Wrench, founder of the English-Speaking Union in 1918, lists as one of his recreations,...

READING these dialogues, written by two Huguenot refugees, is rather like going on a Moberley-jourdain trip—in this case into middle-class family life in Elizabethan London. The...

THIS massive novel is the story of a modern Faust, the German musician, Adrian Leverkiihn (1885-1940), who sold his soul to the Devil in return for twenty-four years of creative...

[A Book Token for one guinea will be awarded to the sender of the first correct solution of this week's crossword to be opened after. noon on Tuesday week, May 17th. Envelopes...

E I 'CIL; 1;4e_ M COMMA 6 i_lArc!E A c..D1we iO.NLIA'1310 K P u wo!iz• ESSIcasc IA H jAi C IA MAU SOLUTION ON MAY 20th The winner of Crossword No. 526 is Miss E M. COWE,...

By CUSTOS THANKS to the underlying strength of the gilt-edged market, itself a consequence of Sir Stafford Cripps's wisdom in refusing to force the pace, the new Gas stock...