If small groups of fanatics are prepared to risk their own lives in discriminate or indiscriminate acts of violence — bombings, shootings, hi-jackings, the holding and execution...

if it is not a traditional institution with its own orthodoxy, and that orthodoxy was traditionally expressed by Mr George Smith, this year's president, in his opening address...

Making do without hypocrisy Hugh Macpherson During these recess days, there is some time to reflect on the wounds that have been inflicted on the body politic by the all-out...

The egotistical gratifications I get from writing this notebook are immense. Last time the Editor was away — at the end of May — I told the story of how I had gone to see an...

The corruptions of success Henry Fairlie In so far as they may be regarded as single, the American people are not — not yet, at any rate — reacting with much excitement to the...

Behind Black September Ibrahim Saleh Hagar . The massacre at Munich raises in an acute form the question of what can be done to combat international terrorism. But first it is...

It's only bloody money David Levy When it was first announced from Moscow that the Kremlin had drastically raised the price of exit visas for certain categories of would-be...

Pawn to king John James Writing during the seventh game of the Spassky-Fischer chess match I said that unless Spassky settled soon he would win no more games. In the event he...

English history is an English-dominated field: as with Concorde, this supremacy is distinguished by the fact that no one else appears to seek it. Brute facts declare against it:...

Auberon Waugh Silence James Kennaway (Cape £1.25) The Night I Caught the Santa Fe Chief Edward Thorpe (Michael Joseph £2.10) A Terminus Place Lee Story (Michael Joseph E2.15)...

Northcote Parkinson Robert Blake, General-at-Sea J. R. Powell (Collins £5) British Admirals of the Eighteenth Century: Tactics in Battle John Creswell (Allen and Unwin £4.80)...

C. M. Woodhouse Memories of a Mountain War — Greece 1944-1949 Kenneth Matthews (Longman 0.50) Greece was in a state of virtually uninterrupted war throughout the 1940's: first...

Joseph Lee The Gehlen Memoirs: Reinhard Gehlen and his Spy Ring Heinz Hoehne and Hermann Zolling (Secker and Warburg £3.50) Network: The truth about General Gehlen (Collins...

Harold Beeley 0 Jerusalem Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4) Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War Dan Kurzman (Vallentine Mitchell £3.95) It...

High winds beat the winter grey of Europe Towards a freshening; rain clouds dump Vast Siberian lakes, blood and swamp Of Pripet on the Somme, over delicate, wiry frontiers; Over...

Bookbuyer Keeping old Stradivari violins in the bank can hardly be justified; producing new books which are not for reading certainly cannot. Andre Deutsch are publishing a £25...

IRA: glorification of failure Ronan Fanning We know that the spirit of Irish freedom is not dead. We know it didn't die either as a result of oppression from without or...

Italian operatic rarities Rodney Milnes It was something of a risk for the Edinburgh Festival in invite the Teatro Massimo from Palermo with three early romantic operas that...

Oddities Nicholas de Jongh No taste or whim is neglected here. Which other festival would offer you both Miss Patricia Gilbert USA in "The Assassination of President Kennedy...

It is extraordinary enough that Viscount Eccles should have given public vent to such pettyor bloody-mindedness in vetoing Sadler's Wells Opera's proposed change of name to the...

Taking a pew Kenneth Hurren Somewhere in the text of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, I claresay there is great spiritual uplift to be derived by those who approach it...

Loaded dice Christopher Hudson In Billy Jack ('AA' Classics Piccadilly and Chelsea) the dice are loaded so heavily they don't bounce. A National Student Film Corporation...

South Bank, London S.E.1 Four good reasons for becoming a member * 1000 films shown annually in NFT 1 and NFT 2 — the best of world cinema, twice nightly, weekend matinees,...

Jump in • the Lake Robin Young The Festival Ballet seem to have assured themselves three weeks of well-sold pertormances at the Festival Hall with a tourist trapping schedule...

• Theatre: The National Theatre's current best are its two American pieces, O'Neill's harrowing Long Day's Journey Into Night and the 1928 newspaper comedy, The Front Page (Old...

Munich memories Clive Gammon Discussion of the Olympics as sporting . contests, let alone as television, inevitably * becomes paltry beside this week's unscheduled shooting...

pianos Benny Green The recent discovery that there are at large in this country no fewer than 2,150,000 pianos reminds me that, had it not been for the wilfully percussive...

Two worlds Peter Quince The air is loud with the sound of the combine harvesters, whirring away like outsize mechanical bees upon every hillside. When I travelled across a...

Sir: Much of the dismay and unhappiness of ordinary Britishers about the Ugandan Asian crisis, as of immigration since the War, arises from the fact that they have nobody to...

or Wolverhampton or Bradford or Slough, rather than in Woking, he would be more concerned about promises made to the British electorate at the time of the last election than...

Sir: Every year, September 1 marks the opening of the season for sniping at the Liberal Party. This year we find Hugh Macpher son stuffing his blunderbuss with rusty old...

From Dr John A. H. Wylie Sir: So great is my regard for The Spectator that I grieve when I feel compelled to take up my pen to adminster a rebuke. It really does not become a...

Sir: I am boycotting the Olympic Games because of the racial, political, economic and religious oppression, brutality, murder and slavery committed separately or in combination...

Sir: The BBC Complaints Commission (Lord Parker, and Sir Edmund Compton) has, in its first two adjudications found that one of the two programmes in question was unfair as a...

Sir: Trade union leaders have now made it clear that their policy of demanding instant pay increases is to be enforced by duress — and regardless of economic circumstance. Yet...

Sir: It typifies the illusions of the anti-Common Market Old Boys that they keep on writing, e.g. in letters to The Spectator, about "Our Dominions.' We haven't any: haven't...

Sir: In disposing of writers of books about China as charlatans and 'travellers,' Professor Joan Robinson FBA (August 26) has made use of information known only to the...

Sir: In James Blish's interesting article (August 19) on the decline of the supernatural there is a point which I think ought to be clarified, particularly in view of his being...

Sir: If there has been a tendency in the past to turn fixed exchange rates into a kind of virility symbol, are you not in danger of falling into the same trap with your repeated...

Sir: I have read much in your pages recently about the value, of the pound sterling and the curreaa problems in the British economy, but I wonder if you know how,eXT asperating...

Sir: People sometimes dart into pedestrian crossings in front of approaching traffic so suddenly as to be a danger to themselves and all concerned, but they don't usually boast...

Sir) The ' generation gap' — the ' cultural gap' — class and prac tically every other division separates me from Auberon Waugh. Only a mutual interest in The Spectator, albeit...

Sir: Since Professor Brogan criticises the late Edmund Wilson's accuracy, should not he himself have 'Thought of Rosie ' instead of Remembering Daisy? C. I. M. Williams 40...

Sir: I went to Zanzibar fifty years ago to train Arab and African teachers. Aboud Jumbe, the present 'ruler of Zanzibar, was one of my African pupils in the 'thirties. He was a...

Sir: The subject set in your recent competition ' Lullaby for a modern infant' reminds me of such a berceuse which appeared in Sellar and Yeatman's And Now All This (Methuen) in...

From Dr Konstantin Bazarov Sir: David Burg (Letters, August 26) blandly assumes that Solzhenitsyn's hostile attitude to the arrg/Feifer biography is based on a misunderstanding...

The seasonal sports of ' Leger-bashing ' is with us once more. The glorious culmination of the triple crown or the dumping ground of a ' B ' stream who failed to win their...

Sir: I apologise to readers for having misled them about Tibor Szamuely, whom I must thank for having corrected me (Letters, August 5). I note that he is not, as I have been...

Nicholas Davenport The latest bulletin of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is somewhat confusing, controversial and, I think, misleading. Because it...

In the red Nephew Wilde When prisoners in Her Majesty's gaols get peeved with conditions they burn their bedding and stay on prison roof tops in protest. All I can do in...

Short on BP John Bull Perhaps because my train broke down outside London Bridge station last Thursday and I had time to study, in detail, the latest National Institute...

Myths proved and refuted by Frank Field People are better off not working and drawing the Assistance. Untrue. The Supplementary Benefits Commission operates the wage stop rule...