The judicial wounds just inflicted on ministers of the Crown over schooling in Tameside and Mr Laker's Skytrain have been welcomed, not to say relished, by a public Which in...

The voice from Dorking John Grigg Mrs Thatcher has returned, at Dorking, to the Russian bogey theme which she first broached a year ago at Chelsea, and on Which she spoke...

Nobody in his senses would wish the nationalised industries to operate at a loss for ever and a day, accustomed though we are to their melancholy record. But what is the value...

More Catholic than the Pope Auberon Waugh Not much excitemeni has been apparent in Britain after the Pope's decision, announced on 25 July, to suspend Archbishop Marcel...

Nicholas von Hoffman Washington For this week anyway, the general opinion is that Ronald Reagan has wiped out Ronald Reagan with his announcement that he had asked...

Patrick Cockburn Israel's Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, recently made a petulant attack on 'Messiahs who discover rot everywhere'. Backtracking slightly, he added that he only...

Robert Skidelsky Did Keynes help save capitalist democracy or did he nudge it towards its doom? A good Marxist answer would be that he did both, and in this case, the Marxists...

The equity question mark Nicholas Davenport The share markets on the Stock Exchange are very sick. Turnover has dropped to the point where many stockbrokers cannot cover their...

Injustices Jeffrey Bernard Newmarket was good enough for me last Saturday. The crowds at Goodwood, and at Royal Ascot come to that, always put me off attending these classier...

Sir: In his article of 24 July, 'Rhodesia at bay', Anthony Lejeune writes, 'economic sanctions tend to benefit the countries against which they are aimed, just as economic aid...

Sir: Peter Young (Letters, 24 July) accuses me of writing nonsense about the postal system. He then goes on to explain that second-class letters are segregated to be dealt with...

Sir: It is hoped that the Annan Committee will recommend the abolition of the BBC licence fee devised half a century ago for very different circumstances. If the Corporation...

Sir: I have been puzzled by the statement in Mr Milnes's review of the opera We Come to the River that one sentence heard at the performance, 'I'll enjoy making a hole in you...

Sir: In theory your suggestion (17 July) that deliveries in London should be barred between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. seems delightfully simple and sensible. Already loading...

Sir: John Bridcut rejoices in Sir William Glock's 'success' in securing the largest audience of the 1961 Proms for a Schoenberg piece (could Schoenberg really have needed such...

Sir: Christopher Booker is a valuable commentator but he was intolerably smug over the BBC television satire , show That Was The Week. . . etc, hardly less so than 'his old...

Sir: 'The friend of Labour persuasion' whom Andrew Alexander (10 July) painfully educated in the ways of the real world is typical of the poor bourgeois who innocently votes...

Robert Blake Essays in English History A. J. P. Taylor (HaMish Hamilton £6.50) Mr Taylor is the Dr Johnson of the Left. He Writes as admirably, though of course in the idiom...

Peter Conrad The Exploring Spirit: America and the World Experience Daniel J. Boorstin, (BBC Publications £3.50) Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence Irma B. Jaffe (Allen...

Sherban Cantacuzino The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology Of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World Joseph Rykwert (Faber and Faber £14.00) The influence of the...

Harriet Waugh A Web of Lace Pascal Laine (Abelard Schuman £2.28) Scenes From Bourgeois Life Mervyn Jones (Quartet £3.95) Canary Pie Stuart Cloete (Collins £3.75) A Web ollace...

Peter Ackroyd My Father Bertrand Russell Katharine Tait (Gollancz £5.95) The disparity in famous men between the public face and the private life is shocking only to voyeurs;...

Francis King P ublished in Paris Hugh Ford (Garnstone Press £6.95) buring the period, 1920-1939, dealt with by this history of expatriate publishers in France„ Paris was briefly...

Simon Jenkins Home Sweet Home: A London Architectural Monograph (Academy Editions £6.95) No one who has lived in London for the past fifteen years has much cause to thank the...

CREATIVE ART OF GARDEN DESIGN by Percy Cane, (Country Life, 1967 ?). George Hutchinson seeks copy in good condition. 56 Doughty Street, London WC1. SHAKESPEARE'S LEGAL &...

Benny Green This week marks the centenary of the birth of the most prolific writer of English fiction of all time, a man who published sixty million words, created at least six...

Helen Smith The very concept of an architect compiling his own retrospective exhibition, in consultation with art historians, is a suspect one and serves as limited a function...

John Bridcut Perhaps the most original celebration thus far of the American Revolution was the performance at the London Round House last week of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight...

Kenneth Hurren The Only Way Out (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs) Elizabeth I (King's Head, Islington) George Thatcher, the author of The 0 11 J' Way Out, which is set in the...

Rodney Milnes Glyndebourne—no Englishman unmoved that legend reads, because with all our faults it still succeeds. Our faults, note, not theirs. Much serious ink is spilled on...