The comfortable majority won by the executive of the National Union of Mineworkers for their strike policy in itself alters nothing: few but the blindest optimists expected the...

From Professor Antony Flew Sir: Your correspondent, the Rev R. C. Sinclair, writes: "1 am not sure that Senor Allende would have been my electoral choice. But I regret that Mr...

Sir: Your lengthy editorial attack (January 26), against the Common Market is surely pointless. No British Government, however much show it might make of renegotiating the terms...

Sir: It was good to find The Spectator once again taking a sound, if unfashionable, line in the matter of threatened environment. In asking 'Who wants 40 million tourists?'...

Sir: In his review of the film Executive Action (February 2), Christopher Hud son notes that "no mention is made of (Oswald's) shooting Police Officer Tippitt in the theatre,...

Sir: In your issue of December 31, 'you printed a letter from me appealing for help from your readers to finance a survey and analysis of visitors to museums. In it I said that...

Sir: Your editorial admits the justice of the claim for Public Lending Right, then denigrates it by a petty sneer (February 2). The point is not that it may further enrich Dame...

Sir: Robert Lindsay's reply to the question: "Is abortion the law's business?" January 19, is slender indeed. He merely quotes John Stuart Mill's utilitarian maxim, "The only...

Sir: I always enjoy Mr Benny Green's articles, many of which are on subjects about which I am sure he knows far more than many writers. I respect his opinions and shall resist...

Sir: A friend of ,mine, recently mentioned unfavourably in your Will Waspe column, accuses me of being the author, and cannot be persuaded otherwise. There is an honourable...

From Mrs Jennifer Wakley Sir: Nils Bohr's remarks (Letters, January 19), about the Church of Scientology betray a sad lack of rationality. I have been a member of the Church of...

Sir: Personal circumstances have prevented my uttering until now a gasp at your book critic Benny Green's assertion that when preparing my Gilbert and Sullivan and Their World I...

Sir: The problem of a recurring series of wage demands for unions which results in the frequent disruption of society must lie solved. Because society demands increasing...

Patrick Cosgrave When she recently gave up her post of Deputy Speaker — having held it for longer than anybody else — I asked Miss Bettie Harvie Anderson what the serried ranks...

When the - shadows of doom darken and hope seems futile, men react in a variety of ways. A leW take to their beds, with real or imaginary ailments. Some, whether courageous or...

Beverley Nichols As the big black car sweeps out of the House of Commons courtyard Jeremy Thorpe waves to the policeman on duty, who answers with a friendly grin. He drives...

The rules of Michael Foot proclaim ll Workers should be paid the same, 11 1 , 4 talk of equal income ceases when miners and engine-drivers claim increases; With equal shares...

Madeleine Simms The Report of the Lane Committee is due out next week. The following article, which shuuld not be taken to represent the view of The Spectator, puts a contrary...

The collapse of London's schools Rhodes Boyson Does the general public realise how dangerous is the situation in London's schools and how near they are to total collapse? Last...

The emergence of Gerald Ford Max Wyndham An impeachable offence is whatever a majority of the House of Representat 1 v e5 considers it to be at a given moment of hI 5 : tory....

As we were at the Club the other night, I observed that my old friend Sir Simon d'Audley, contrary to his usual custom, sat very silent, and instead of minding what was said by...

Michael Schofield One of the difficulties in any discussion about sexual morality is that any static code of behaviour will soon be outdated. We live in a state of transition...

John Linklater The medical press recently reported, without adverse comment, a proposal that the Open University could solve the national shortage of doctors. The proposal...

Philip Kleinman Does advertising work? An odd and irrelevant question, you may think, to be putting to serious people at a time of economic crisis. Of course — don't I hear you...

Martin Sullivan Just over 100 years ago John Ruskin delivered himself of a public lecture in Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme...

Pamala Vandyke Price People react in diverse ways crises, but I had not anticipate", that the current complications 0 ' life would strip the years off sd many contemporary...

Peter Quince After the great gales, which felled a couple of fine old trees in the parish and littered the ground with severed branches and broken twigs, the countryside...

In the autumn of 1814 Coleridge stayed for some days at Corsham House, near Bath. There he admired the picture gallery (which still remains, together with some of its original...

Peter Ackroyd Harvest Home Thomas Tryon (Hodder and Stoughton £2.95) Rest Without Peace Elizabeth Byrd (MacMillan £2,50) Pollow, Follow Alice Glenday (Collins £2.25) There is...

Alastair Buchan Kissinger: The Uses of Power David Landau (Robson Books £3.25) The rise of Henry Kissinger in the past five years, from a professorship at Harvard to the...

The pressure of other work, and the presence at The Spectator of a literary editor who does not have the appreciation of detective and thriller fiction required to harass me for...

J.I.M. Stewart The Born Exile: George Gissing Gillian Tin dall (Temple Smith £4.00) "Gissing," Virginia Woolf wrote, "is one ° f those imperfect novelists through whose books...

Patrick Wall Banda Philip Short (Routledge and Kegani Paul £3.50) `Kwacha,"Uhuru,"Freedom' are words that have dominated the African continent in the second half of the...

Once upon a time Benny Green Before Anthony Curtis's The Pattern of Maugham (Hamish Hamilton £3.50) loses the bloom of novelty and subsides on to the Eng. Lit. bookshelves, I...

Bookend The death of so accomplished a biographer as James Pope-Hennessy would have been a sad loss to authorship at any time. A former literary editor of The Spectator, he...

A popular new genre seems to be developing — that of the documentary thriller. You choose your historical event, cobble up a few plausible statistics, add an accumulation of...

Rodney Milnes, If suspension of disbelief is any part of theatrical performance , then Colin Graham's production of Massenet's Manon at the Coliseum must be counted some sort...

"Kenneth Hurren _ I somehow knew before I got into the auditorium proper that Le Grand Magic Circus, a peripatetic French company which is at the Round House for a season, was...

Clive Gammon It must be disappointing for His Excellency the Ambassador of the Bundesrepublik, but there's no sign yet that the BBC is headed towards a love-the-Krauts cam...

Wasp e Unlikely though it will seem to London listeners exposed to his morning chat-stint with Janet Street-Porter on struggling LBC, and to readers of his plodding new column...

Nicholas Davenport After the collapse of its phoney base — the FT thirty index at one time was only A point above 300, its lowest level for six or seven Years — the equity...

Ivor Catt On March 1, 1973, the National Research Development Corporation said that the CAM invention " ...could be of fundamental im portance in the design, construction and...

The fringe banks are still in trouble, though it is being concealed from the public and depositors by the intercession of the joint stock banks who are hopefully attempting to...

So the favourite gets beat, brought down or, as on Saturday, falls. You swear a little, drink a lot, double your stake on the next race and there the matter ends. It takes a...

Carol Wright The dream of aiming a place in the country, though which country is the question, is a snob aspiration that becomes more possible as travel cheapens. I've dallied...