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Sir: Murray Sayle, whose death you noted last week, was not only among the best contributors to The Spectator in the 1980s: his articles were distinguished also by their great [...]

One of the joys of visiting Leon and Burgos, two of the principal cities of Spain, is that you are highly unlikely to meet another foreign tourist. It was midsummer, [...]

Ian Gilmour was not the only proprietor of The Spectator also to be its editor, but he was unquestionably the best. Patrician, wealthy, high-minded, unassuming, the 28-year-old Etonian ex-Grenadier Guardsman […]

The most memorable thing about Orson Welles's film Othello--he gave one of his hammier performances as the Moor, Micheal MacLiammoir played Iago as an old queen and Desdemona was completely […]

I wonder whether the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, will eat quail again after the shooting incident in south Texas last month, when he ignored the most basic safety rules in [...]

Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer by Alexander Maitland HarperCollins, 25 £, pp. 528, ISBN 0002556081 20 £ (plus 2.45 £ p&p) 0870 429 6655 How much more [...]

Where are the pike, the char, the carp of yesteryear? Still in English lakes and rivers, but they are not to be found in the English kitchen. Pike, then called [...]

Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon's eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of [...]

COUNTRY FAIR by Max Hastings HarperCollins, 20 £, pp. 276, ISBN 0007198868 [telephone] 16 £ (plus 2.45 £ p&p) 0870 429 6655 The farmer and writer, A. G. Street, who [...]

You don't often see a large turbot these days. My guess is that the big ones, like most of the lobsters and crabs caught in our waters, go to Spain [...]

I have recently acquired a charming little book by Ambrose Heath called From Creel to Kitchen. Published in 1939, it offers recipes for 20 species of freshwater fish caught in [...]

Whiting does not seem to be fashionable these days--perhaps it never was--but in my early 20th-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica it is described as 'one of the most valuable [...]

A few years before his assassination in 1908, King Carlos of Portugal published a book on the tuna, its distribution and the various species of the fish. I am not [...]

An Indian friend with whom I have been staying in the Nilgiri Hills was asking what had happened to the whitebait which he used to enjoy years ago in England, [...]

If America can be associated with one shellfish more than any other, it must surely be the clam. I know that New England is supposedly the home of the clambake, [...]

There is plenty of life, as well as recent death, in a fish market. For its colour and noise and atmosphere the market by the Rialto bridge in Venice is [...]

We are in danger of losing our eels. To many people this may be of little interest, but it is a serious matter. The vast numbers of baby eels (elvers) [...]

For the first time since childhood, I am taking cod-liver oil again. In Iceland this summer (to fish for salmon) I was intrigued by the bottle of thick yellow liquid [...]

Sir: Tristan Garel-Jones got a bit confused in the course of his touching tribute to Carmen Ordonez (Bullfighting, 18 September). While very few would dispute that her father Antonio was […]

At the beginning of this month, after two weeks in south-west France (where I came across several fish unknown in this country), it was good to get back in time [...]

'Jack likes a herring for his tea,' I remember, years ago, our gardener's wife used to say. That was before herring stocks crashed in the 1970s and the fishery was [...]

Do we keep enough British lobsters for ourselves? I was pondering this question a couple of weeks ago as I watched a container lorry leaving the Hebridean island of Tiree [...]

The gurnard is an odd fish. Known formerly as gurnet, it apparently makes a grunting sound (hence its French name, grondin) both in the water and when caught. The better [...]