T he Department of Health arranged to book for a year a hospital in Redhill, Surrey, run by Bupa, to allow 5,000 operations to be completed. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister,...

I t is too easy to see the violence in the Middle East as a never-ending cycle of outrage and revenge; tit for tat, and then rat-tat-tat for rat-tat-tat. When 25 civilians are...

W ith the West, or part of it, merrily bombing one Mohammedan country and threatening to bomb another, or several others, I wonder why our leaders are so apparently confident...

PETER OBORNE T his is what lain Duncan Smith had to say just a week before his election as leader of the Conservative party: 'The character of your leadership is set in the...

Tania Kindersley believes in freedom of expression and in an unfettered sexuality, but in this frank and disturbing investigation shows why hardcore pornography is repulsive,...

WAS standing in the kitchen the other day discussing Christmas cake icing with a friend while the menfolk were sitting down in the next room rambling on about the best way of...

Raehael Jones discovers that her husband surfs the Net for porn, and concludes that we live in a sick society I HAVE been with my husband for almost 30 years. He's 64 and I'm...

Tim Luckhurst says that Scotland's land reform Bill reminds him of Mugabe's seizure of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe LAST summer President Vladimir Putin recommended a...

IF Hamlet were alive today, he would probably ask for counselling; and this, of course, would save the lives of Polonius, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, etc. Hamlet would be...

Bruce Anderson reports on the latest scientific moves to reduce the West's dangerous dependence on Arab oil IT was a dinner-party conversation, and a mood of eupeptic...

A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit BEWARE your backgammon set: the time has come for it to join your fur slippers and ivory-handled knives in the deep...

Correlli Barnett says we need an army to defend the realm, not to further the PM's pious ambition to spread peace and love THE unfolding mess in Afghanistan, a faraway country...

James Bartholomew goes to the brink and argues that the present system seriously damages the health of both the poor and the rich WE should just abolish the NHS. We should not...

Jonathan Freedland says the decision to close a school in Islington smacks not so much of loony leftism as of hard-nosed capitalism PERHAPS they can tell this story to the...

SIMON HEFFER has been arguing that Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood" speech was warning against the dangers not of racism but of multiculturalism. But what does multiculturalism...

CHRISTOPHER FILDES G uess what Sir Howard Davies wants for Christmas. That's right: regulators. Already his dockside tower is home to 2,000 of them, but now that they are a law...

PAUL JOHNSON S pare a thought for the innocent members of the enormous bin Laden family. If they stay put, they are pointed at; if they move across frontiers, they are prime...

FRANK JOHNSON T he December issue of History Magazine has a sensational story, or at least a sensational allegation. The magazine has been in the shops for several days. Yet...

From the Marques de Lendinez Sir: I must congratulate you on Simon Young's article (Hard rock', 1 December), in which he exposes the rank hypocrisy of the Spanish government's...

From Mr Roger Broad Sir: John Laughland paints a pathetic picture of a guileless Britain outmanoeuvred in 1950 by a cunning federalist and supranationalist Jean Monnet (`Monnet...

From Mr Paul Rochester Sir: Simon Heifer criticised Mark Bolland for many things (`Court in the act', 1 December), but complimented him on his successful 'Operation PB'....

From Mrs Tessa Keswick Sir: I must write to protest about two articles which you published recently. One was by Bevis Hillier (24 November) that described all Conservatives as...

From Mr Tony Stoller Sir: The complaints upheld in respect of Premier Christian Radio (Tor Christ's sake', 24 November) would perhaps not be so much of a surprise, as they...

From Mr Ban Roozendaal Sir: Reading Fraser Bailey's entertaining account of Holland's socio-economic scenery (`Dutch treat', 24 November), I could not help wondering if he meant...

From Mr Michael Day Thompson Sir: On Radio Four's World This Weekend on Sunday, commenting on the appropriate response to the reported multiple bomb outrages in Israel, the...

From Mr Alistair B. Cooke Sir: It is highly unlikely that a 19th-century Paul Johnson (And another thing, 24 November) would have heard Gladstone's rich baritone singing the...

STEPHEN GLOVER L et me make my position clear. I like the Beatles, and still very occasionally listen to their records. They make me think of a misspent youth. One can take...

Philip Hensher THE DEDALUS BOOK OF ABSINTHE by Phil Baker Dedalus, £9.99, pp. 296, ISBN 1873982941 J ohn Hurt has a good story about his first meeting with Quentin Crisp. I...

David Nokes THE PERREAUS AND MRS RUDD by Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen University of California Press, £22.95, pp. 360, ISBN 0520220625 A ccustomed to read books in which...

Mark Archer DR STRANGELOVE'S GAME by Paul Strathern Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0241141396 P aul Strathern is an academic journalist with a gift for enlivening...

Justin Marozzi WALKING THE BIBLE by Bruce Feller Piatkus, £17.99, pp. 428, ISBN 0749922613 A nericans do many things yen,' well. They win wars, invent spacecraft, compose...

Charlotte Mitchell THE MAKING OF A MARCHIONESS by Frances Hodgson Burnett Persephone Books, £10, pp. 328, ISBN 1903155142 F rances Hodgson Burnett was much given to lavish...

Anne Chisholm THE PANKHURSTS by Martin Pugh Allen Lane, £20, pp. 560, ISBN 0713994398 A s we all know, women in this country had to fight long and hard for the vote, and the...

Andro Linklater SOLDIERS: FIGHTING MEN'S LIVES, 1901-2001 by Philip Ziegler Chatto, £20, pp. 352, ISBN 0701169540 REDCOAT: THE BRITISH SOLDIER IN THE AGE OF HORSE AND MUSKET by...

Tom Johnson CHAMBERS CROSSWORD MANUAL by Don Manley Chambers, £6.99, pp. 329, ISBN 0550120068 CHAMBERS CONCISE CROSSWORD DICTIONARY Chambers, £9.99, pp. 889, ISBN 0550120122...

Harriet Waugh ACID ROW by Minette Waiters Macmillan, £16.99, pp. 352, ISBN 0333907485 o r the second time Minette Walters has chosen to follow Ruth Renclell's more recent...

Jane Gardam THE VISITOR by Maeve Brennan Atlantic Books, £9.99, pp. 86, ISBN 190003809762 A tlantic Books has published for the first time a short novel by Maeve Brennan found...

The Bayeux Tapestry, seen from behind, Plays square peg to a round-hole mind. Random, chaotic, apparent abstraction, The brain made dizzy by the eye's reaction. From the front...

Caroline Moorehead HUMAN RIGHTS AS POLITICS AND IDOLATRY by Michael Ignatieff, edited by Amy Gutmann Princeton,f13.95, pp. 216, ISBN 0691088934 I t is a good moment to be...

Juliet Townsend I remember once standing in the uncovered ruins of Skara Brae on Orkney and thinking how very cold and uncomfortable it must have been to live in a time and...

Charles Mitchell R eaders of David Lodge may recall the enjoyable episode in Changing Places when the members of a university English department play the game of Humiliation,...

David Ekserdjian h e inexorable rise of the exhibition catalogue continues apace, and many of the most enticing of this year's potential stocking-fillers (or -bursters) fall...

Michael Howard WAGING MODERN WAR by General Wesley K. Clark Public Affairs Ltd, Oxford, 119.99, pp. 486, ISBN 1903985080 W esley Clark was Supreme Allied Commander of Nato...

Diana Hendry COLLECTED STORIES by Saul Bellow Viking, 420, pp. 442, ISBN 067089172X W ith Bellow nearing 90, there has to be 'A Collected', though personally I'd prefer three...

Francis King THE REAL TADZIO by Gilbert Adair Short Books, £4.99, pp. 104, ISBN 1904095070 I read this elegantly nuanced essay on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and the boy,...

Stephen Pettitt wishes that recording companies would look to the future as well as the past T he text for today's sermon is necessarily generic rather than specific. It takes...

Turner Prize 2001 (Tate Britain, till 20 January) Nothing ventured Martin Gayford Y ou have to be quite old to remember a time when the Turner Prize — founded in 1984 —...

Peaks and Glaciers (John Mitchell & Son, 160 New Bond Street, London Wl. till 21 December) Mountain magic Andrew Lambirth F lying over the Alps recently, in autumn afternoon...

Stuart Nicholson I s New York the jazz centre of the world? Well, lots of people still think so. Since the late 1920s it has been at the heart of jazz innovation — most of the...

Riding in Cars with Boys (12, selected cinemas) What's done is done Mark Steyn I 'm 22,' says Beverly Donofrio, 'and I still haven't accepted that this is my life.' She has a...

Louise Flind asks her father, George Christie, about his retirement h e other day I went with some trepidation to interview my father, George Christie, chairman of Glyndebourne...

The Rake's Progress (Coliseum) Doom and despond Michael Tanner E NO's new production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress is quite good, but not quite good enough to silence...

Boston Marriage (New Ambassadors) Strange union Toby Young B oston Marriage, a play by David Mamet, had been running for 45 minutes before one of the characters uttered a...

Marcus Berkmann W hat do you want for Christmas? The age-old question, as ancient as the term 'megastore itself. As ever, many thousands of CDs crowd in for your attention,...

James Delingpole I n France, Germany, Italy and Spain, Ken Loach's The Navigators was first screened at the cinema. In Britain, it was shown on television (Channel 4, Sunday)...

Michael Vestey K nneth Tynan's diaries, published posthumously in October, are vastly entertaining, strewn with bon mots, aphorisms, waspish gossip, melancholy self-doubt...

Robin Oakley O n the racecourse, virtue only gets you so far. Stand back politely for a lady and you'll get only 7-4 where she got 2-1. Tell the barmaid the chap next to you...

Taki T New York he very first article, not column. I wrote for The Spectator was in 1977. And it was about Greek paranoia. Yes, you guessed it. It was about plane-spotters,...

Petronella Wyatt I have an American friend with whom I often quarrel. He claims that the British are anti-Semitic. I say they are not. I remind him of places such as Florida,...

Simon Barnes THERE is a perfect inevitability about the best coincidences. Coincidence, said Dr Trelawney, is magic in action: and magic (ask Harry Potter) is not necessarily...

Dear Mary. . . Q. Apropos your reply to the letter (24 November) from the lady with the curmudgeonly husband, I have to tell you I was always taught that it is milk that comes...