The Complete Scientist (Oxford University Press; 18s.; paper 12s. 6d.) contains the report of a group of educationists, under the chairmanship of the Rector of Imperial College, to the British Association. Its purpose is to suggest means of overcoming the acknowledged narrowness of general culture of the professional scientists and technologists now being turned out by our universities. Though based on a comparatively small survey of selected schools and universities, the conclusions reached compel attention by their reasonableness, and the firmness with which they are pressed; they ought to be carefully considered by everyone with a concern for higher education in this country.

In broad outline, the conclusions are conservative: there is to be no radical change in the type of education we provide, but the main weaknesses have got to be cured. With one exception, members of the Group wished to maintain the educational system in which specialization begins with the sixth form at school and continues through a three-year university course: the continental and Scottish systems are not recommended. The basic change must be at the school level, though it will reflect itself higher up. In the sixth form, the specialist in science ought to spend twice as much time on non-scientific pursuits as he now does: some twelve periods a week instead of the present average of six, with, of course, consequent reduction in die time given to science. Below the sixth, the present time-table is regarded as satisfactory.

The John Hay Whitney Collection of paintings in the possession of the outgoing American ambassador to London has for the last six weeks drawn crowds to the Tate Gallery, attracted perhaps by the legendary worth of a private collection such as could scarcely exist nowadays in England. And it must be admitted that these seventy pictures, mostly acquired in the ten years that followed the end of the war in 1945, have the patina of eminent acceptability. Apart from a stray Blake, two Zoffanys and a group of American paintings, they reflect the definitive arrival of the impressionists and post-impressionists as the artists most appropriate for embassy walls.

But Mr Whitney’s choice is marvellously sound. As Sir John Rothensteiny remarks in his introduction to the catalogue (which is itself worthy of so magnificent an exhibition), the criterion has not been a mere ‘programme’, but rather the inherent quality of the actual painting. Thus Braque is, in the gallery sense, not at all well represented, but the two land- (or rather land-and-sea-) scapes of his fauve period in the collection are wonderful in their own right; one can at once see why they were bought, and how irrelevant it would be to insist that they should be ‘matched’ by his later work. Picasso, indeed, is represented by a splendid cubist Homme Assis as well as by a tender portrait of 1905, but once more it is the autonomous interest of the picture that matters. We feel that the whole collection, however ‘safe’ it may seem, is the vindication of the individual picture’s right to please.

At a time when the upward trend in crime continues steadily and our annual total of indictable offences in 1960 is certain to be the highest ever recorded by the police, it is perhaps not unreasonable that many who are concerned with the day-to-day administration of the criminal law and the treatment of offenders, are doubting whether all this recent activity and expenditure in criminological research can produce results likely to be of practical value in dealing with this phenomenon of lawlessness, now universally regarded as a major social problem of contemporary society.

A survey of the results of research by sociologists and others in their efforts to solve delinquency problems which was published only two years ago by Lady Wootton offers little encouragement. In it she seriously questioned the methods used and many of the conclusions reached by workers in this field. In fact, it was pointed out that current theories in criminology are so numerous that they can easily accommodate any facts, however mutually contradictory they may be! In fact, ‘A lament for criminology’ might have been the subtitle of this admirable book. It is true that since then the situation has to some extent improved, and in recent years the Government has strengthened the arm of research by its support and practical tokens of its interest.

But on the basis of past experience, it would, nevertheless, be unwise to expect in the near future any spectacular results from research which could possibly lead to an immediate and substantial diminution in the annual volume of crime.

By way of respite from their indefatigable re-fighting of the battles of 1939-45 (I take it that by about 1971 we shall be getting down to ‘I Was Rommel’s Batman’s Uncle,’ No. 368 in the series Now It Can Be Told, And Just You Try And Stop Us Telling It) the editors of the Sunday Times occasionally suborn some eminent personage to act as guide to the British middle classes in a brief tour round quite another battlefield—admittedly a peripheral one and of no strategic importance—that of painting. Sometimes, I suspect, they don’t get quite what they bargained for. Thus Professor Lawrence Gowing, asked to provide some useful tips on sketching for the amateur, offered a ruminative, elliptical, and, to his professional colleagues, fascinating, account of his own profound researches and procedures in the landscape art. Thus Victor Pasmore, of whom it had perhaps been hoped that he would mitigate the austerities of pure abstraction with a little apologetic honey, came up with a difficult, uncompromising and disdainful manifesto with as little of the glad-hander about it as a curled-up hedgehog.

But when Sir Kenneth Clark agreed to contribute a series of articles on important pictures of his own choosing, I think everyone must have been delighted with the result. He could not be faulted on matters of fact by the art-historians, being himself an illustrious elder of their tribe. The generality of painters might dissent in detail from his judgments, but they could not dismiss or deride them, based as they are on scrutiny of the works at least as long and acute as any which they themselves would be capable of, and on a far wider frame of historical and cultural reference.

There is little doubt that the most ok cinematic name in England to-day is that of Michelangelo Antonioni; critics back from Cannes brought reports of I’Avventura as voluminous as they were contradictory, and when last autumn it finally came to London—briefly at the South Bank Festival and then for an extended commercial run—the wave of interest and praise gathered momentum. In January and February of this year the National Film Theatre, sensibly cashing in on a vogue which it had done much to initiate, has been running an Antonioni season, and at the time of writing we have been able to see all his work except La Notte, the latest, which may not be available in time for this series.

It is, however, quite possible to come to some general conclusions about the work of this enigmatic director from the films shown already and, judging from I’Avventura, it seems unlikely in any case that the new picture is going to be radically different from the rest. Antonioni would never, I think, be a director with whom I would feel instinctively at home; his world is not mine, nor his obsessions; the people in whom he is interested are not those whose fives I should often feel drawn to study minutely. But his seeing eye, his concentration of observation, his obvious intellectual and sensuous delight in image and composition and movement compel one’s attentive admiration. In other words, though I often do not agree with what he has chosen to say, I would defend to the death his fashion of saying it.

In the latest issue of the Revue Internationale du Cinema, the journal of the international Catholic cinema office, there is an article on the moral assessment of certain recent co-production films, as applied in various national centres. This demonstrates how the same film may get very different ratings from country to country: when we see that La Dolce Vita has been put into the ‘a proscrire’ category in Italy, the point is well taken. For now that it has reached the commercial screen in England it is difficult, from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, to see what all the fuss was about. From this side of the Channel it looks even more like a scathing moral indictment of a way of living that may be over-stated but is, as we all know, true enough in its essentials. Signor Fellini has said in a London interview that the Rome he has portrayed is his idea of Rome, not necessarily the true Rome; but this is no more, after all, than any creator’s way with his material and need not in any way surprise us.

This long film, whose spatial control is so precise and whose temporal control is often so slack, sprawls across nearly three hours in a series of episodes whose visual attack frequently packs a much heavier punch than their intellectual content. From the first moment when the helicopter bears down upon the Roman suburbs, with the statue of Christ the Worker slung beneath it—ruined viaduct and bare tenement wall taking the statue’s shadow like a stigmata—Fellini’s sheer cinematic virtuosity imposes itself without question.