Yours faithfully, Anthony Gee London, W14 The writer is a former RC priest. From Mr Robert Nowell Sir: Bishop Hugh Lindsay (5 July) is indeed right to point out that clerical celibacy is an outstandingly idealistic way of showing we are made to live ...

I'm the sort of person Mrs Thatcher's parents warned her not to talk to as a little girl. I'm quite proud of that - Ken Livingstone I don't go around flirting with Prime Ministers ... not consciously - Edwina Currie I try to think of God, then Father...

Since the decision last December to review the scheme, an active campaign of local residents has demonstrated their overwhelming support for the Western Bypass. They inundated the Secretary of State with nearly 18,000 representations in favour of the...

For 20 years this image has been as famous as any media icon in the pantheon of fame. Be it Ali McGraw in the Seventies or Liz Hurley today, he is up there beside them. The difference is that while their stars flash briefly, the light of Professor St...

Since 1843 the Shaftesbury Homes and Arethusa, one of Britain's oldest children's charities, has been totally committed to providing a sound upbringing for disadvantaged children. While striving to improve professional standards through the residenti...

Of the four Commissioners I have know, Condon is the smartest, the coolest and the most calculating. He is a politician to his fingertips, better at handling himself in public than most government ministers. And behind him stands the amiable but form...

But it was not to be. With Michael Heseltine's backing, John Major has tilted the balance of power in his cabinet towards the Tory centre-left, naming a team that is the least Thatcherite since he entered No 10. The result is that Messrs Major, Blair...

At the heart of the bargain in New York between nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states, which recently secured the indefinite prolongation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, was agreement by the former that they would exercise the "utmost restra...

What is the essence of GP fundholding? Once you strip away from it the government flannel and the "feel-good" factor, fundholding creates for the more entrepreneurial GPs a direct cash incentive to hold down prescribing costs. Surely it is better to ...

Sir: With reference to your article "Vatican faces revolt among Austrian flock" (5 July), it is not just in Austria that the formal authorities of the Catholic Church are being challenged. It is happening everywhere, including in this country, but th...

Sir: The accuracy of Derek Hodgson's piece about Wisden (4 July) can be gauged by the fact that the name of my publication is given wrongly five times in four paragraphs. Likewise, he attributes to me supposedly controversial changes in the format I ...

Sir: I write as a pro-European who is (therefore) anti-Maastricht. Now that the anti-ECU John Redwood is on hold, can we not look on the good side of the common European currency issue? What bliss it will be! That family holiday is looming, whether o...

Sir: As a Korean student, I am partly in agreement with James Fenton ("Pitiless corruption and national shame", 3 July): "corruption and greed must be to blame" for the collapse of the Sampoong department store in Seoul. According to his appropriate ...

Sir: On the subject of Douglas Hurd's departure from the Foreign Office, John Marshall, MP for Hendon South, is quoted (6 July) as saying: It must be a matter of great satisfaction to him that he leaves the world a safer and freer place than it was i...

Escape from work seemed to be the only certainty, the only thing you could rely on was two weeks away. Except that just now your holiday - should you be able to afford one - has never looked so insecure. In Greece, hundreds of back-packing young Brit...

The proposal is that every four-year-old should be entitled to a pounds 1,100 voucher for nursery education. The money could be spent in the private or voluntary sector, where parents would have to pay a top-up fee of anything up to pounds 2,000 a ye...

Sir: Any Christian generosity I might have is being strained too far by Cardinal Hume and Bishop Lindsay et al asking me to welcome the ordination of Anglican clergy to the Catholic priesthood. Bishop Lindsay carefully avoided any reference to the re...

This has provoked debate because it follows a long period in which conventional wisdom held that the press was as powerful as - or more powerful than - the Government. The Prime Minister, as Norman Lamont pointed out in a bitter speech on his return ...