... Mr. Packard his albatross ■gg j Bl VANCE PACKARD SEEMS TO ME TO BE rapidly turning into the Ancient Mariner of our times, gripping us by the collective elbow and pouring into our appalled ears yet another gripping instalment about the nasty habits and attitudes that are currently frightening him to death. He also has a splendid gift lor pinning chic-sounding labels on the monstrous activities ...

... music Organising the Edinburgh Festival must be the hottest job in the arts business. It is not only still the biggest there is; it offers no clear-cut brief, except comprehensiveness. People tend to judge it more on what's been left out than what's gone in, and if you can keep half of them happy for any of the time, you are doing pretty well. This said, only modified rapture for Mr Peter Dia- ...

... THE NEW PENGUIN BATCH PLEASES me so much this week that we'll begin with them, and especially with Cyril Connolly's dazzling There's all manner of skulduggery afoot in The Secret Partner-- and dust is thrown in everybody's eyes, including yours-- but I must say I found Mr. Stewart Granger's odd behaviour suspicious from the start. 1 mean, would you continue to patronize a dentist who is black ...

... THEhTRE FIRST FIVE: 1 World Theatre Season, Aldwych. 2 Man Superman. 3 Arsenic and Old Lace. 4 How's the World Treating You? 5 Hello Dolly! On Easter Monday 10 years ago the Royal Court Theatre opened its doors to the first performance given by the English Stage Company. The policy was to present plays by new writers and their open ing choice fell on The Mul berry Bush, by novelist Angus ...

... FIRST FIVE: 1 Elektra, Covent Garden (Thurs Tues). 2 LPO, Festival Hall Thurs 3 St Matthew Passion, Festival Hall (Fri). 4 LPO, Svetlanov, Festival Hall (Tues). 5 RPO, Swiss Cottage Odeon (Tues). Alan Rawsthorne is probably the only living composer who started out as a dentist. Paren tal opposition, he records in Who's Who, delayed his entry into ; his father, a doc tor, thought medicine a ...

... riuin One important thing that a Harold Pinter script gives to a film is personality. One can rely on the dialogue to be off beat, but all on a similar plane. To a chilly, compelling and rather sharp new spy thriller called The Quiller Memoran dum (A, Odeon Leicester Square, currently), Pinter contributes a faintly mocking, faintly menacing collection of words that give the characters ...

... REC0RD5 Verdi: Requiem (RCA Victor. Stereo: SER 5537-8). This perform ance will certainly collect innumerable admirers. Though Verdi's operatic treatment of the Messa da Requiem is now accepted as an expression of true faith--a man speaking in the language he knows, and thus being completely true to himself--there are still a number of people who find the nervous dramatic approach of Toscanini ...

... Boy-country No-man's-land m IN A BOOK THAT could have been gimmicky or sentimental or souped- up with any number of singing strings in the background, Sammy Going South, the author, W. H. Canaway, never puts a foot wrong. It's a simple, dangerous-journey adventure-story, with the one big difference that the adventurer is a small boy of 10, orphaned during Suez and in search of his only ...

... THEIITRE Riding in on the boom for art nouveau and all things fin de siècle, the National Theatre offers Feydeau's 1907 farce La Puce a L'Oreille, vivaciously translated by John Mortimer as A Flea in Her Ear. Jacques Charon has been imported from the Comedie Française to direct; the beautiful sets and ravishing costumes are by André Levasseur. The programme book pro tests perhaps too much ...

... Elspeth Grant MEETING HIM IN REAL LIFE, ONE finds Mr. Kenneth More a blithe spirit who could, one feels, Kip- lingesquely meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two im postors both the same. In Man In The Moon, as a guinea-pig at a research centre preoccupied with the cause and cure of the common cold, he is therefore convincingly tire one person exposed to all con ceivable risks of ...

... Siriol Hugh- Jones AS THE LEAVES DRIFT ANKLE-HIGH in the gutters, so do the bookshops start to silt up with the great pre- Christmas flood. Booksellers at this time of year develop a sort of built-in flinch, as of a man about to ward off a smart blow on the head from a toppling pile of bumper annuals Space being what it is, I am going to cram in as many books as possible this week, with an ...

... RECORD REUIEUI BVBRRRV FM1T0I1I carry r antoni is 23 years old and describes himself as a mass communicator which is remarkably accu rate considering his many activities. As compere for Whole Scene Going, as an accomplished painter, a former art teacher, a writer, illustrator and song writer for Billy Fury. More re cently he has branched into the fields of acting and singing. His first ...