Each of them at the time had a leadership determined to turn its country upside down. The leaders were usually ruthless to the point of fanaticism and intent on propagating a message – an ideology or religion – that would set people free. Each revolution, too, was produced by deep tensions in the old society. Then Andy Warhol came up with a portrait of Mao that made him look like a tired circus performer.

When the Cold War ended, this satirical approach became a way of envisaging revolutions. TV adverts for lager dressed actors up as Stalin; Lenin lookalikes were photographed with tourists on Red Square.
Revolutions no longer terrify us. William Hague’s invocation to Tories to undertake a “common-sense revolution” shows that it is often the right that now employs revolutionary rhetoric. But, as Fred Halliday asserts in his new book, revolutions should be treated with circumspection. The rot set in with those T-shirts of Che Guevara in the Sixties; revolution became a fashion item. Now all he has to do is convince the country that he will ensure fair shares are distributed to everyone..

NOT SO long ago, revolutions had to be taken seriously. Mao’s Little Red Book was examined for clues about Peking’s domestic policies. Biographies of Robespierre were searched for hints about Soviet political practice. The English Civil War retained huge interest; there was endless debate on the contribution of Cromwell’s rule to life in modern Britain

All that seems like a bygone age. And social justice makes an appearance, with the pledge to create a new children’s fund to help fight the “war on child poverty”.The Chancellor closed his speech with traditional, headline-grabbing generosity: free television licences for everybody over 75. We might almost call that a redistributive measure, a little bit of fairness smuggled into a Budget for enterprise. What we have is a Chancellor for business, who has managed to convince most of his party that growing the cake is a recipe for feeding everyone at the table.

“Fashion Exposures”, a sale and exhibition of contemporary photography, with framed and signed images donated by a stellar spectrum of star snappers, is the place to find such treasures.
The exhibition, now in its 11th year, works in conjunction with the charity Fashion Acts, the British fashion industry’s initiative that aims to raise both funds and awareness for people affected by HIV and Aids.This year, as well as helping the public to get their hands on the work of top photographers, the organisers also sent a bunch of celebrities an Olympus I-Zoom camera each, with which to record their own memorable moments.Here’s your chance to see what Noel Gallagher, Mick Jagger, Ruby Wax and Jude Law came up with, not to mention Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a member of the Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, confirms the integral part Simone’s music played in the civil rights movement: “Nina Simone helped people survive. George Jackson, a field marshall in the Black Panthers, was murdered by a guard in San Quentin prison in August 1971, and at his funeral, Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free” was played.

In 1970, on their debut album, The Last Poets declared: “I am the wish that makes Nina Simone wish she knew how it felt to be free.” And in the same year, students in Mississippi played her music before incinerating a Confederate flag. The plain truth was we were in retreat.”Her bitterness exploded during a concert in Newark in March 1970. In front of a totally black audience, she savaged the failings of black and white politicians and, later, noted: “That was the beginning of my withdrawal from political performance.” She soon began a long period of self-imposed exile in Barbados, Liberia and, finally, Europe.But her music continued to inspire. Many black Americans now depended on more aggressive factions such as the Black Panthers and the radically altered SNCC, led by Stokely Carmichael.It was during these years that she disclosed, “news came through every day of friends being arrested, beaten and intimidated”, and the FBI was also monitoring her.By the turn of the decade, her heroic impetus had stalled: “Every black political organisation of importance had been infiltrated by the FBI, police terrorised our communities.

And she flung herself into supporting civil rights marches and performed many benefit concerts, some within the ugly racial atmosphere of Mississippi and Alabama.She also attended Malcolm X’s rallies. His assassination in 1965 only aggravated the rising sense of disillusionment affecting black Americans, which plunged to their nadir in the wake of Martin Luther King’s murder. She describes the brutal premeditated murder of Medgar Evers, a secretary for the NAACP, in June 1963, as “the match that lit the fuse”. But it was the bombing of a church in Alabama three months later, which killed four black girls and was the subject of Spike Lee’s recent documentary, that finally provoked her into dedicating herself unflinchingly to “the struggle for black justice, freedom and equality”.On hearing the tragic news, she admitted: “I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone.” But she decided to channel her vitriol into the song “Mississippi Goddam”, which she composed that very day, with inflammatory lyrics such as: “Oh, this whole country’s full of lies, You’re all going to die and die like flies, I don’t trust you any more.” The song was the first to unearth the sense of impatient indignation infiltrating the civil rights movement.In the following few years, she recorded many more songs with uncompromising political statements like “Old Jim Crow”; “Four Women”; “Backlash Blues”; “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free” and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”. I knew prejudice existed, but I never thought it could have such a direct effect on my future”.By the end of the 1950s, combining jazz and blues with classical inflections, she lived in New York and had befriended members of the black intelligentsia such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.But she credits Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play, Raisin in the Sun, with initiating her deeper political education: “Through her, I started thinking about myself as a black person in a country run by white people and a woman in a world run by men.” In 1962, she was also introduced to and inspired by Stokely Carmichael, who later coined the phrase “Black Power”, and she was now making political comments on stage herself, but not in song. But it was at a recital in front of her sponsors that she witnessed the prejudice simmering behind the town’s benign facade.

It was nominated for an Oscar but lost to “Talk to the Animals” from Dr Dolittle. One replacement was Jerry Yester, who subsequently joined the Lovin’ Spoonful. Gilkyson’s many songs included the folk-based “Green Fields” for the Brothers Four, a US No 2.In 1967 Gilkyson wrote “The Bare Necessities” for the Walt Disney cartoon The Jungle Book; the song, performed in the film by Phil Harris as Baloo, has also been recorded by Louis Armstrong and Kenny Ball. The following year, their adaptation of a calypso from the West Indies, “Marianne”, went to No 4 on the US charts, with a rival version by the Hilltoppers doing equally well. The Hilltoppers and the King Brothers had success with the song in the UK but Gilkyson’s record was No 1 in Australia.In 1958 the Easy Riders scored the film Windjammer, and then in the 1960s, Gilkyson wrote music for the long-running television series The Wonderful World of Disney. The title track of their 1961 LP, Remember the Alamo, was recorded by both Johnny Cash and Donovan.Gilkyson preferred being a songwriter to performing, and the Easy Riders spent most of the 1960s without him. Guy Mitchell had fun with Gilkyson’s song “Christopher Columbus”, but the best-known song, “Memories are Made of This”, was a transatlantic No l for Dean Martin in 1956 and also sold well for Gale Storm, Dave King and, in 1967, Val Doonican.With his songwriting friends Rick Dehr and Frank Miller, Gilkyson had formed a folk group, Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders, and they made a popular album, Golden Minutes of Folk Music, in 1953.

He was born in 1916 in a stone house built by his great-grandfather in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He was playing the piano by the age of four, but tired of his later music studies at the University of Pennsylvania and left before graduation. In 1938 he worked on ranches in New Mexico and Arizona and both learnt and performed western songs. During the Second World War, he became a popular entertainer on Armed Forces Radio.
He recorded two albums of folk songs, The Solitary Singer, volumes 1 and 2, in 1950 and 1951, but had his first hit record when he joined the Weavers, with “On Top of Old Smokey”, also in 1951. By then, he was establishing himself as a songwriter: both Frankie Laine and Tennessee Ernie Ford did well with “The Cry of the Wild Goose” (1950) and Laine also scored with “Girl in the Wood”, “Tell Me a Story”, “Roving Gambler” and “Love is a Golden Ring”, which he recorded with Gilkyson’s group, the Easy Riders, in 1957. TERRY GILKYSON wrote several of the biggest hit records of the early 1950s. His “Memories are Made of This” became both a well-known song and a clever catchphrase for the nostalgia boom.

His praise suggests that he still regards Mr Portillo as a future Tory leader.Lord Parkinson urged the former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine to bow to Eurosceptics by standing down at the next election. And he said that the former chancellor Kenneth Clarke had “to acknowledge that he’ll never come back as a great political figure”.. His claims, if true, would undermine the case against the two Libyans accused of the terrorist act.
The revelation will give a major headache to the prosecution in the case. Edwin Bollier, a Swiss businessman who sold timing devices to Libya, has told prosecutors that a tiny fragment found after the 1988 aircraft crash could not have been used in a bomb. A KEY witness has claimed that a crucial piece of evidence from the Lockerbie bombing is flawed.

Parliament doesn’t have too many of them.”He went on: “I think William Hague will make him chairman of the party and they’ll make an excellent combination.”His comments are significant because Lord Parkinson remains a leading figure amongst the party’s Thatcherites. Even the most optimistic Tory MPs speak of securing a hung Parliament.Lord Parkinson, who won a landslide victory as party chairman in the 1983 election, told the Cambridge students he believed that Michael Portillo would be made Tory chairman after returning to the Commons in this month’s by-election in Kensington and Chelsea.Heaping praise on Mr Portillo, Lord Parkinson described him as “very able, very bright, he has a coherent set of beliefs” “He was the best Defence Secretary we’ve had in many years He’s an outstandingly capable person An excellent minister and debater, with joined-up politics. One insider said last night: “Everyone is talking about whether William will hang on as leader if we lose, and how well he would have to do to keep his job.”Despite public declarations that the Tories can win the next election, some frontbench opposition spokesmen believe the best they can hope for is to cut Tony Blair’s 177-strong majority to about 50. The former cabinet minister, who was brought back as party chairman when William Hague became Tory leader in 1997, predicted Labour would win a second term when he addressed the Cambridge Forum, a debating society at Cambridge University.
His comments will embarrass the Tory leadership but reflect the private views of many senior figures in the party. This is one of the findings in Community Relations Work with Pre-School Children, by Dr Paul Connolly of the University of Ulster.Obstacles to peace, page 4Donald Macintyre, Review, page 3. LORD PARKINSON, the former Tory party chairman, has admitted that a Conservative victory at the next general election is “unlikely”.

A first draft of a possible IRA statement was said to have been turned down by Unionist negotiators. The elements of a deal are said to hinge on such a statement, which would be made with other statements from the Unionist party, the British, Irish and American governments and the Decommissioning Commission, headed by the Canadian general John de Chastelain.There is also conjecture that the IRA would appoint an interlocutor to liaise with the general’s commission.The difficulties are illustrated by a new book that shows that, by the age of two, many children are aware of categories such as Catholic, Protestant, RUC and IRA. This raised the question of how Mr Trimble might sell to his divided party any scheme which did not conform to its policy of “no guns, no government”. It includes many who insist early decommissioning must take place, together with many who are opposed to the idea of a cross-community executive.Mr Trimble yesterday flitted between Stormont’s Castle Buildings, where the negotiations take place, and the Stormont parliament buildings, where he met members of his assembly party. This was interpreted by some as an indication that he was preparing the way to announce a deal.But although expectations were high, most speculation centred on a series of phased steps which would see Unionists move towards forming a government while republicans moved in the direction of decommissioning.

Let yourself be put off by it, though, and you’ll miss out on a ribaldly anachronistic version of history that is no more subtle but far funnier. Reginald FitzUrse, William de Traci, Richard le Bret and Hugh de Morville are spied at four points during their year-long hideout in Knaresborough Castle, Yorkshire. Eugene Asti was their painstaking accompanist, whereas the Florestan’s pianist Susan Tomes returned for the popular Second Piano Quintet. Tomes’s finely shaded handling of the Scherzo’s trio was a particular joy.That Dvorak was a master of melody and orchestral colour is widely acknowledged; but that he was a truly great composer is something that the next century is duty-bound to confirm.Rob Cowan. THE PUN-INTENDED title of Paul Corcoran’s debut comedy about the four knights who assassinated Thomas a Becket in 1170 is as wince-making as a Sun headline. The F minor Trio should surely scotch such arguments for good, though the “American” style E flat String Quintet that followed the talk could as easily support them.As to the rest of the series, Moravian Duets and Gipsy Songs were shared between contralto Hilary Summers and soprano Helene Wold. Better still was Professor Jan Smaczny’s thought-provoking talk about the “life and works”, homing in on potential creative routes that, had they been followed, might have led to Czech variants on Debussy, Strauss or Schoenberg.

Perhaps the fact that Dvorak didn’t follow them helps explain why he is still denigrated in some quarters as “lightweight”. Earlier, violinist Anthony Marwood treated us to the winsome Four Romantic Pieces, but his playing in the Trio seemed more candidly responsive.The documentary centre-piece of the Rhapsody was an absorbing film by Lucille Carra and Brian Cotnoir entitled Dvorak in America, with vintage shots of Prague, New York and Chicago, spoken quotations from Dvorak’s letters and sundry interviews. Richard Lester of the Florestan Trio had been scheduled to play cello both in the Sextet and in the Second Piano Quintet, but could not due to the birth of his son, Joel. Lester was back with the Florestan for a strongly stated account of Dvorak’s greatest chamber work, his F minor Piano Trio.
Their CD of the piece is very good, but this was better – more dashing, and more at one with the almost desperate arguments that dominate most of the first movement. It’s tuneful, innovative, rhythmically alive, direct and appreciative of indigenous cultures – especially Afro and Native Americans. First to sound in this seven-hour “Bohemian Rhapsody” was the glorious but little-known String Sextet, a storehouse of interesting musical ideas. Stephanie Gonley played a sweet-toned first violin, warmly supported by violinist Harvey de Souza, violists Timothy Boulton and Louise Williams, and cellists Timothy Gill and Steven Doane.

(See below for details.)
Fund managers are concerned first-timers do not get burnt. It runs the Unit Trust Information Service, with free guides to the industry: call 0208-207 1361. Autif can also give you a list of local IFAs by passing your details on to Independent Financial Advice Promotions (IFAP). But be prepared to leave your investment undisturbed for at least five years Anything less is gambling And you do not have to invest a large lump sum straightaway. If you invest via their ISA, they typically reduce the initial charge from 5 per cent to 3 per cent.
There are 1,700 funds spread across more than 20 sectors that cover the world as well as separate industries.

Some funds are run on an ethical or environmental basis, while some of the cheapest are so-called tracker funds that simply follow a stock market index up and down.
Autif supplies basic information onfunds and their performance. Many management groups welcome regular monthly savings from £10 upwards. Income from a deposit account over that time would have provided £4,530, but the original investment of £10,000 would have remained the same.
Such performance cannot be guaranteed, but as little as £10 a month can get you a slice of the equity action. But if you leave all your spare cash on deposit, its value will be eaten into by inflation – at whatever level – and it can never grow in a real sense. If you are new to saving and investing, you may feel instinctively that building society savings accounts are safe and any stock market investment is risky.

But if you leave all your spare cash on deposit, its value will be eaten into by inflation – at whatever level – and it can never grow in a real sense.

Figures from the Association of Unit Trusts and Investment Funds (Autif) show that an investor who placed £10,000 in the average UK equity income unit trust 10 years ago, would have received £4,800 in income over the 10 years to 1 October 1999 They would have also seen their savings grow to £17,910. The tension between these polarities makes for interesting reading.. If you are new to saving and investing, you may feel instinctively that building society savings accounts are safe and any stock market investment is risky. Fred Halliday acknowledges his intellectual debt to the Trotskyist historian Isaac Deutscher. Much of the book, however, cuts a path away from Deutscher, who was hardly sensitive about Lenin’s victims after 1917.

His surely accurate perception is that the tattered banner of Leninist world revolution still fluttered in the Kremlin even under Brezhnev in the 1970s. The arms aid lavished on liberation movements in Africa and Asia was no accident; it was inherent in the USSR’s need to secure itself as a global superpower.
Halliday’s specialist work on Iran, moreover, allows him to make incisive comparisons between Khomeini and Soviet leaders. If I have a criticism, it is that if Khomeini can be categorised as a revolutionary, then so can Hitler (who is excluded) But this is a quibble. Ideological élan breeds a desire to transform societies beyond the one in which the revolution was born.
But revolutionaries in government have to weigh up the risks to domestic consolidation posed by foreign military adventures This was Lenin’s dilemma in 1920.

DIANE STURCH
Northwood, Middlesex. Last week, though, he posted a statement on the official Stephen King website contending that the media had taken some of his comments to Couric out of context. “My endurance is much less than it was, and my output has been cut in half, but I am working,” he insisted.If so, how long will it be before Bullet, Smith, the van, the sledgehammer and his lap skewed sideways make it into a best-seller? “Sooner or later,” he told Couric, “everything goes in.”.

Jenness contends that that act of generosity alone will bias the jury in the writer’s favour. He is also trying to have the trial heard in a state outside Maine, where feelings about King are less passionate. District Attorney Joseph O’Connor ridicules this, pointing out that King is famous everywhere. “Realistically, where will you change the venue to?” he asks. “Timbuktu?”What of Mr King’s writing, meanwhile? Ten days ago fans had a fright, when the author gave his first televised interview since his accident.

Talking to Katie Couric of the Today show on NBC, he revealed that when he tried to resume work after the summer he found himself almost totally blocked “It was as if I’d never done this in my life. It was like starting over from square one.” He even intimated that he might never complete a new work again. Some letter-writers suggest that if it had been King at the wheel and Smith had been the victim, no charges would ever have been brought. Prosecutors in Bangor insist that the trial will be unaffected by the identity of the man run down.Mr Smith’s lawyer, John Jenness, is unconvinced. He notes that following his treatment at two Maine hospitals, Mr King made donations to them amounting to $200,000. But their relative isolation makes them wary of anything that smacks of the big city. Nobody, not even King, should be allowed to trample the small guy.”The pendulum has definitely swung back against Mr King and for Mr Smith,” Dick Shaw, the paper’s editorial page assistant, confirmed yesterday.

“At first, most of the letters were quite sympathetic to King, but after a while people began to think that King’s celebrity was having an unfair bearing on how justice would come out.”The love that Maine people feel for King may become eclipsed by their natural instinct to back the underdog. At first, sympathy in Maine was with the Kings, who are virtual patron saints of the state But recently emotions have begun to turn. Letters to the Bangor News have been running about four-to-one behind Smith.That the people of Bangor should be voicing sympathy with Smith, rather than King, seems surprising. It is not that in Maine, where fish and trees traditionally provided most people’s income before the growth of tourism, people are especially fickle.

The West can help; but not until Russia is willing to dig itself out of the political, economic and military hole that it has dug.. “NOW HE’S Sixty-Four!” You read it here first, but in seven years’ time many headlines will use that emended phrase upon Paul McCartney’s birthday. Neither Mr Gorbachev nor the West appeared to notice the inherent contradiction.The contrasts remain stark. Yesterday, we saw the blackly comic sight of Mr Putin declaring that “the time has come” to declare war on corruption, in order “to preserve the people’s trust in the state”. Until now, Mr Putin presumably did not believe that such an attack was essential – though a report by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development argued this week that corruption in Russia is one of the most important obstacles to growth.Mr Putin acknowledged that criminal groups influence huge areas of Russia’s economy, and that Russia’s “international prestige” has been damaged These admissions are all very well. Mikhail Gorbachev repeatedly insisted that the West must give him billions of dollars in loans, or face disaster; meanwhile his most respected economic advisers deserted him in droves because of his dogged refusal to introduce the radical reforms they believed were essential. The message seems to be, “Give us the money – we’ll decide what to spend it on.” Morality aside, the Chechen war is a drain on the Russian economy.

Disbursing money to Russia at this stage is the equivalent of giving a patient a blood transfusion while he opens up his own arteries.Moscow issues dire warnings of the catastrophe that will follow if Western bankers are unkind This is a familiar tack. The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, is optimistic that the money will be disbursed He should be proved wrong. An approval of the planned $640m tranche will send all the wrong signals This is not a time to reward Russia; on the contrary. Russian attacks on civilian targets in Chechnya continue, even as Western leaders timidly criticise the brutal assaults.
The granting of loans makes life easier for the Russian government, just when it is embarking on an expensive and probably long-drawn-out war.

As the broomstick-riding players of quidditch would say: it’s a golden snitch.. A DELEGATION of the International Monetary Fund began talks in Moscow yesterday on releasing part of a $4.5bn loan to Russia. A work that is compelling for children stands comparison with literary heavyweights. None the less, the explicit overlap between appreciation of children’s and adult’s literature is to be welcomed; it is the opposite of dumbing down.

It is fitting that Harry and his quidditch-playing friends should now be considered not just the province of young readers. The latest in the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is on the shortlist for the Whitbread Children’s Award. The rules have been modified so that Harry can win the adult Whitbread, too.
Admittedly, Joanne Rowling scarcely needs any more prizes. JK Rowling has created a fictional character who seems certain to flourish well into the 21st century.

Kournikova double-faulted at game point in the second game of the second set, allowing Henin to rally from 0-40 for a break to tie the set 1-1.
Kournikova appeared to win the fourth game, but the baseline judge ruled a return by Henin did not cross the line.
Kournikova, the crowd favorite from the outset, was visibly frustrated with several calls.
In other action, American Chanda Rubin defeated Israel’s Anna Smashnova 6-4, 6-4. “I thought I could play a good match, but I don’t have the experience.”
In a 51-minute first set, Henin rallied from double set point to win the tiebreaker Henin broke serve at 3-3 as Kournikova double-faulted twice. “The big difference is that the putts have started to fall.”
The 36-year-old from Surrey has an added incentive to win this week as she is desperate to make it seven years in a row with a win on each side of the Atlantic.
Davies is joined in the one million US dollars end-of-season tournament, which is restricted to the tour’s top 30 money winners, by fellow Britons Janice Moodie, Catriona Matthew and Helen Dobson.
All three have qualified for the first time despite failing to win this year, although the trio have enjoyed a string of top-10 finishes between them.. Twelfth-ranked Anna Kournikova lost to 70th-ranked Justine Henin of Belgium 7-6 (8-6), 6-4 in the first round of the Advanta Championships in Villanova, Pennsylvania on Tuesday night.

Kournikova struggled throughout with her serve, failing to hold serve four times in the second set.
“I didn’t think I could win,” Henin, 17, said. Twelfth-ranked Anna Kournikova lost to 70th-ranked Justine Henin of Belgium 7-6 (8-6), 6-4 in the first round of the Advanta Championships in Villanova, Pennsylvania on Tuesday night.

The field of 11 3-person teams started out under a bright sun with a slight haze lingering over the heavily forested hills that rim the scenic course.
The golfer said his recent string of victories has not softened his desire to win in Taiwan.
“Every time I tee up, I tee up to win,” he said. “That’s always been my goal since I was a little boy and that hasn’t changed.”. England’s Laura Davies has won three times in Europe and once in Japan but is plotting a successful defence of the Tour Players’ Championship in Las Vegas this week to make her season complete. England’s Laura Davies has won three times in Europe and once in Japan but is plotting a successful defence of the Tour Players’ Championship in Las Vegas this week to make her season complete.

Fresh from finishing second in a Japanese event last week, the self-confessed gambler lines up in one of her favourite cities tomorrow aiming to repeat the form that clinched the title by four shots a year ago.
“Last year I came into the event really low on confidence, but this year has been much better,” said Davies, who banked £204,000 in winning the European number one title. My mother was very strict, as are moshim of Thailand.
“I’ve always wanted to visit Taiwan and China and see the rich history,” he said.
Woods will probably be visiting the region more often in the future as his Tiger Woods Foundation expands into Asia. The foundation, which teaches golf to underprivileged children, will be setting up operations in Thailand soon, and may also hold programs in China and Japan, Woods said.
“Maybe there will be a champion golfer, who knows,” Woods said.
After his news conference, the American teed off in a one-day, 18-hole tournament between teams of professionals and amateurs from clubs in Taiwan. The Classic is co-sanctioned by the Australian, Asian and European Professional Golf Associations.
Other golfers have said the long course at Ta Shee would favor a powerful driver like Woods, but the 23-year-old golfer said that might not be the case.
“The golf course is long on the scorecar are playing really fast,” Woods said.
Drives get so much bounce that some players known as long hitters have been handling the fairways in practice sessions with smaller clubs, such as nine irons and eight irons, even on par five holes, Woods said.
Woods said competing in Asia is special because his mother is Thai and has ancestral ties to China.
“For me, coming to Asia is like coming home,” he said “I was raised under an Asian culture.

Last night I didn’t sleep all that well,” said Woods, adding that he was fortunate to have a late tee-off time.
Woods’ tournament victory in Spain was his fourth straight and eighth this season. He is defending his title in the $1.3 million Johnnie Walker Classic, which was held in Thailand last year.
No one since Ben Hogan in 1953 has won four straight tournaments. Woods won the NEC Invitational, Disney Classic, Tour Championship and the World Golf Championship in Spain.
However, a win in the Classic, which is not sanctioned by the US Professional Golf Association, will not count toward Woods’ latest string of victories, which were all on the now-concluded PGA tour. We stopped in Dubai and Bangkok to get here,” said Woods, who arrived on Tuesday after winning the American Express Championship in Sotogrande, Spain, on Sunday.
“The time change hasn’t been too hard to get over, but hard enough. Fatigued from a 20-hour flight and a grueling tournament schedule, a bleary-eyed Tiger Woods said today that his late tee off at the Johnnie Walker Classic will give him time to shake jet lag.

On his first visit to Taiwan, Woods will try to extend his incredible four-tournament winning streak at the classic, which starts on Thursday at the Ta Shee Golf and Country Club in suburban Taipei.
“It took us 20 hours to get here.

Woods completed 75 rounds with an adjusted scoring average of 68.43. David Duval was runner-up with a 69.17 average over 74 rounds. The previous best adjusted scoring mark of 68.81 was set by Greg Norman in 1994.. Fatigued from a 20-hour flight and a grueling tournament schedule, a bleary-eyed Tiger Woods said today that his late tee off at the Johnnie Walker Classic will give him time to shake jet lag. He is by far the world’s best performer and by far the best in his sport of any No 1.”
* Tiger Woods has been named the winner of the Vardon Trophy for best scoring average on the US PGA Tour. “As we have seen today, the purses are increasing all the time on the European tour and I’ll go along with that.
“I seem to gain enough world ranking points here without having to go to America more My goal is to get to No 2 in the world.

But in a sense he was addicted to the law, certainly relishing that period during which he was a prosecuting attorney in the Organised Crime Section of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, and gleefully describing the pursuit of criminals (at a time when the Boston Irish and the Mafia “wise guys” were killing each other in all-out war) as “the last officially sponsored blood sport”. Higgins Inc lasted from 1973 through to 1978; a partnership, Griffin and Higgins, from 1978 through to 1982.He didn’t desperately need the work. His books, even at the end, could still command high initial print-runs (over 30,000 copies in hardback, which most writers would murder for, even in the United States). He rarely even strayed from his home state of Massachusetts.He was born in 1939 in Brockton, Massachusetts, educated at Rockland High and Boston College, then Stanford University in California, where he gained an MA in English. He obtained a law degree from the Boston College Law School, and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1967. Thereafter be rose steadily through the establishment ranks – Deputy Assistant Attorney General (1967-69) and Assistant Attorney General (1969-70) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; Assistant US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts (1970-73); Special Assistant US Attorney (1973-74) – before branching out into the private sector George V. The book garnered extraordinary tributes not only from the usual suspects – “the most powerful and frightening crime novel.

I have read this year”, raved the crime-writer Ross Macdonald – but from literary New York too. Norman Mailer homed straight in on the dialogue and made a telling, and critically very sharp, comparison: “Higgins may be the American writer who is closest to Henry Green” (the British experimentalist whose novels were virtually all colloquy) – before descending into excitable blurbwriter-speak: “What I can’t get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz.”Yet perhaps only the fuzz – or at any rate a working US District Attorney who never minded getting his hands dirty on a case, and who for nearly half a decade was a federal prosecutor in the Organised Crime Section and the Criminal Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office – could have written a first novel that so perfectly mirrored his own hard experience hewing out a kind of justice at the legal coal-face.Apart from a useful couple of years in newspapers at the start of his career, George Vincent Higgins lived and had his being in the world of the law. All are more or less in thrall to the “wise guys”, the syndicate wheels who call the shots, take the profits, order (though never ever mete out: that’s for the footsoldiers) the punishments, the death-warrants for stupidity and treachery.The Friends of Eddie Coyle is compulsively readable, driven as it is by the Higgins trademark of low-life dialogue that is as hard and glittery as a velvet-plush trayful of diamonds – dialogue that almost takes the breath away, it is so rock-solid real. His friends are his fellow hoods – gunmen, bagmen, bank-rollers – who trust him about as much as he trusts them (“not a whole hell of a lot”). Coyle is a provider of hardware for a bunch of bank heisters, who, to protect himself against being sent up for a second stretch, talks to the cops. Higgins, in his later books, was perfectly capable of having a character monopolise conversations, events, the plot, everything.

He was not a difficult writer to parody.
His “one book” was – in a sense sadly – his very first, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), a thriller of surpassing brilliance in which Higgins dug deep into the political, social and criminal midden that was Boston, Massachusetts. Until, in essence, all that remained was “two guys gabbing at each other” – or even one guy soliloquising for paragraph after paragraph, page after interminable page. That of course is somewhat of an exaggeration; but it is not a travesty. He wrote superbly dialogued, complexly plotted, richly characterised novels – yet all just a slight variation on the same basic riff. And, as the years went by and the books stacked up, the similarities began to stand out, hardly helped by their author’s reliance, more and more, on pure dialogue, to the point where narrative – scene descriptions, back-story, the intricate social hinterland against which the novels’ events were played out – virtually disappeared. Throughout his life, he kept himself fit by working out on gymnastics apparatus and by taking a daily one-hour walk. IT IS unquestionably unfair to dub any writer a one-book man, especially when he’s published well over 20 Nevertheless in the case of George V Higgins the fact has to be faced.