a new president of the National Union of Students has occasioned much public comment. The NUS is in many ways an odd body, based in part upon the notion that students a a group...

The mineworkers' vote against allowing their leaders "to call a national strike or other industrial action . . . to obtain a satisfactory response to the claim on behalf of all...

Have we heard the last of the proposal to compel museums to introduce charges for admission? Hugh Leggatt, the art dealer and carripaigner, begins to hope that this may be the...

Questioning Question Time Patrick Cosgrave Mr John Davies is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Apart from being responsible for the administration of the Duchy and obliged...

Kindly leave the stage Michael Harrington One of the most curious and persistent notions in our public life is the idea that political rationality lies at what is called 'the...

Problems for Mujib Kuldip Nayar If elections in a democracy were an end In themselves, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would have been on the top of the world because he has swept the...

For the people Nigel Frith Staying with an old friend last weekend, and sleeping in his study, I opened my eyes to 'find a little pink book staring me in the face. j took down...

Tango malady lingers on David Holbrook What kind of a game is the press Playing, today, over the question of s copophilia, and its commercial exPloitation? Scopophilia is the...

THE EXCUSES FOR the Government's ' U ' turns are endless. The latest, Puzzle hears, is the Prime Minister going round saying gloomily, "Capitalism has failed." What price our...

Fiedler has long been a lone ranger in those marches where academic respect. ability merges into individual gurumongering and self-promotion. And it has been a specialised...

Auberon Waugh The Last Supper Chaim Berman (Eyre Methuen a75) The Diabolical Liberties of Uncle Max Cyril Kersh (Michael Joseph £2.25) A Girl Who Came to Stay Ray s Connolly...

Kenneth Minogue Nationalism and the International System F. H. Hinsley (Hodder and Stoughton £3) At the very beginning of his survey of Nationalism and the International...

John Welcome Golden Soak Hammond Innes (Collins £2) The Bitter Tea Gavin Black (Collins Crime Club £1.70) One Jump Ahead Anthony Armstrong (Eyre Methuen £1.95) Ransom Jon...

The English as Collectors Frank Harmann (Chatto and Windus £10) At various times since the sixteenth century the English have been afflicted with a sense of their inferiority in...

Casualties and survivors y MIInes tae stoniest heart, and mine is as adamantine as Father Garnet's kidney, Must feel sympathy for a Royal Opera Whose season is being bedeviled...

season at Stratford-upon-Avon opened last week with a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and Terry Hands, who directed it, might be forgiven for thinking that there is as...

Critic sings the blues Christopher Hudson The publicity material has a drawing of a bejewelled arm holding a microphone. A pair of handcuffs dangles from the wrist. This sums...

Flouncers Duncan Fallowell David Bowie, who is now hugely successful on both sides of the ditch, and the father of flounce rock, is undertaking with his painted troupe of...

Benny Green What's in a name? Nothing, according to William Shakespeare, although he would no doubt have sung another song had his Parents labelled him Clunge, Morbidia or...

Only those who believe homosexuality to be a condition deserving unqualified censure can have thought my remarks last week about the late Sir Noel Coward an assault upon the...

Nicholas Davenport The Government deserves no sympathy for the crisis in money rates and mortgage rates which has overtaken and upset the smooth operation of Phase 2 of its...

Addressing Stockholders at the 46th Annual General Meeting of Imperial Chemical Industries Limited, held in London on April 3rd, Mr. Jack Callard, the Chairman, said: "1972 was...

Golden assets, Nephew Wilde I don't know if it is a sign of our times or whether my face is particularly dishonest but after losing money on the first two races at Aintree on...

Weighing the risks John Bull On April Fool's Day a year ago I first wrote about the speculative attractions of dealing in shares in the period of a stock exchange account. I...

The price of Haslemere Estates, the property group run by Fred Cleary, has fallen back from its 60p run-up last week and is now back down to 264p. The Sunday Times Business News...

How wonderful to find a way To tax most things for which we pay. Vat's such a jolly little tax To pay on clothes and cars and snacks, On kettles, nails and sealing-wax. We...

Douglas Curtis The birth of their first child should have been a cause for unalloyed joy in Mike and Ashra. Both are young and intelligent with good future prospects and a high...

Secret service John Rowan Wilson A common complaint about the Health Service is that the doctors, especially in hospitals, are offhand and never tell you anything. A friend of...

Oral food PamelaVandykePrice Food to me is something to put into my mouth. I was an invariable opter-out at those tots' parties when it was such a lark to stuff jelly down...

The Monday Club Sir: Mr Patrick Cosgrave says, "Whatever is going on in the Monday Club has nothing to do with the manoeuvres of the proPowell group." Of course it has not; the...

Sir: Your Vespa vulgaris (or should it be crabro?), Will Waspe, arrived in time to sting the corpses of Noel Coward and Hugh Beaumont before the coffinlids were shut on them;...

Binkie Beaumont (March 31) far exceeded in bitchiness anything written or said by either of the men whose death he (laments? celebrates?). He clearly is obsessed by homosexuals,...

Sir: Stephen Spender rebukes Philip Larkin for only including one facet of Housman — the "Roman-epigrammatic." The truth is that no anthology could do justice to the protean...

Sir: Digby Jacks (Letters, March 31) demonstrates one reason why grown people don't take students seriously — or at least students' "spokesmen." Since you have written saying...

a British university and his experience may help to put this subject into a little clearer perspective. He lived on his grant during the three university terms — approximately...

It was a strange and novel sensation to watch your selection win the National while wishing with all your heart he'd fail to get there. Strictly speaking I should be wallowing...

to support striking unions brings to mind two events which took place at the University of Surrey about eighteen months ago. The first concerned a short-cut through acedemic...

page article ' Fewer means better' (March 17). There is no doubt that the barrack room lawyers of the student bodies have forced a reappraisal of university attitudes and...

Sir: I refer to the article by Dorothy Becker on the above topic in The Spectator of March 24. She says: " If it is open to a member of the government of the day to be...

Sir: In his reply to my IcAter C. N. Gilmore seems at first to be going to make the quite reasonable point that it might be better to use all the available good nurses — as they...