1846: First successful use of anaesthetic, at Massachusetts General Hospital. 1902: The first Borstal opens in the village of Borstal, Kent. 1916: The first birth control clinic opens in the United States. 1923: In Switzerland, John Harwood patents t...

Sir: The finding ("Teaching at new universities fails to make the grade", 12 October) that ratings for teaching excellence tend to coincide with research excellence ratings is unsurprising. The ethos of a university largely depends on the interrelati...

"The library's memory is long," records the Librarian, "but not so long as to have kept it in mind that a volume of Lord Albemarle's Memoirs of Rockingham and his Contemporaries, long since replaced, was still in orbit. Shortly after publication in 1...

Collect it in a teaspoon, advises Luela Palmer, and offer it to your garden gnome. If the gnome imbibes it, you will be lucky. Keith Burnett sprinkles it over floury baps "for a lustrous finish" or as a replacement for the misplaced contents of a fun...

Sir: As a wartime operational member of the organisation on which the SAS was founded - the Special Operations Executive - I read the report of Michael Portillo's speech to the Conservative conference with some amusement ("Portillo whips up nationali...

On your very special day, We wish you all the best. And if you plan to go away, Don't forget your vest. No one, however, voted for that or anything much like it, and our taste for greeting card verse, limericks, bawdy rugby ballads and all the things...

Sir: Allow me to correct an untrue statement about the pulsar discovery, ascribed to John Maddox, and quoted by Paul Vallely in his article (News Analysis; "The Nobel art of picking winners", 10 October) on the Nobel awards. He writes "... though Hew...

Sir: Gillian Shephard's "new" initiative to record oral scores at GCSE English is actually nothing new at all ("Shephard to penalise 'grunting' youngsters", 12 October). Until 1993, GCSE English grades did record both a written and oral component. Th...

Sir: Peter Lilley went on at length in his Blackpool speech about the abuse of the benefits system by alleged bogus asylum seekers. As an immigration consultant, I have as clients a small number of asylum seekers. Most of them have been waiting a lon...

With concern visibly mounting with each new death or maiming, it is difficult to believe that boxing can survive unscathed. The outright banning of boxing would be hard to justify in the face of the enthusiasm of the boxers and their audiences, but t...

But in the case of John Major's new vision for Britain as the "enterprise centre of Europe", it is the reverse deception which holds. It looks as though he has presented us with a statement of the bleeding obvious in asserting what it is he wants for...

The inference is that social workers who have undergone Ray Wyre's training (such as myself) are led into over-enthusiasm for obtaining convictions, and can somehow make children lay false claims. I do not believe that children who have not been sexu...

Virginia Bottomley, Secretary of State for National Heritage, formerly Secretary of State for Health Was not this piece of hyperbole a cheap attempt to curry favour with his audience and a sad commentary on the depths to which a leading politician ca...

They are wrong, and there is an illustrious witness for the defence. Kipling was a great writer, though often a mysterious one. His reputation as the Bard of Empire is obviously true, but it misses the point. So is his reputation as a vulgarian. He h...

The wife of a very senior 1980s cabinet minister once said of the constant decision-making under pressure, "Oh, they love it", and Peter Shore explained why. Being a cabinet minister, he said, is "endlessly stimulating ... there is a kind of flow of ...

It is this which accounts for their jovial manner. Soon they will be released from the tyranny of the private office and the red box. They will miss their official cars, of course. But most of them feel that some benefactor will speedily remedy this ...

The fuss about the sexiness of women's magazines has this conventional shape. First came a babble of indistinct comment about what these magazines were putting on their covers - invitations to the ultimate thrill, recipes for the ultimate spasm, with...

From here on, it gets more complicated. Admirers view Wolf as the current standard-bearer of feminism, the fresh iconoclastic voice who breathed life into a moribund movement. Carmen Callil, who published The Beauty Myth, remains an enthusiastic supp...

He states that Her Majesty is Queen of Australia "because of British laws and no other". The truth is that Queen Elizabeth is Queen of Australia by an Act of the Australian parliament. Donald Foreman The Monarchist League London WC1N

For my part, as a junior barrister (ie not a QC) but with some years' experience, I calculate that so far this year I have spent seven days working for nothing, and I am not alone. This practice has increased since the latest restrictions imposed on ...

Dunphy is critical of my statement that as a result of the judgment the game will never be the same again. Yet clearly this is going to be the case. The consequences are a contraction in the number of clubs and job opportunities. Without protection f...

However, my sympathy took a dent when I read that the Nottingham child abuse investigation "broke down amid re- criminations between the police and social workers". I was the police officer in charge of that case and would like to make it clear that ...