Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

On a rainy day in Manhattan, Lord Dunsany, 74-year-old Irish poet-playwright, believer in fairies and master of the fantastic, arrived on the Queen Mary for his first U.S. visit in 30 years. Before he flew off to spend the rest of his vacation in California, a New York Times reporter panned a few verbal nuggets. Samples:

Did he object to flying in such weather? "I am eager to go. There's nothing more fascinating than the other side of the clouds; the far side is intensely beautiful." His philosophy? "I'll give you quite a chunk of my philosophy in just seven words: 'The wolf is always at the door.' There's no use killing any of them, because there is always another. I'm not complaining of him--he keeps us fit and even alive, if we are alert." His best period of writing: during the 1940 blitz on London, when he was a member of the Home Guard. "Goering used to send his boys over every day and night then. And I found it a stimulus to writing poetry. Why, the air was full of gold those days; you had only to reach up and pull it down."

Eugene Dennis, general secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, now serving a five-year sentence for conspiracy in Atlanta's federal penitentiary, entered the prison hospital to have his infected gall bladder removed.

Doctors gave Actress Bette Davis, whose Broadway show Two's Company closed a fortnight ago because of her frequent illness, an unhappy diagnosis: severe chronic osteomyelitis of the jawbone. She was ordered to the hospital to have the entire infected portion of the bone removed.

William O'Dwyer, former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico and now a Mexico City emigre, was in a Beverly Hills clinic with "an old thyroid condition that needs checking every so often."

Queen Mary, 85, was reported to be recovering after a 19-day battle with a gastric upset. The Duke of Windsor, on his way to visit her, said that because of one of his mother's well-known idiosyncrasies he had been "very worried" and unsatisfied with the secondhand reports of her condition. He had not been able to speak with her by phone because "my mother has never spoken on the telephone in her life. It is one of those strange things. She is sort of scared of it. I don't know why."

Arthur Godfrey planned to take sick leave (beginning May 4) from his CBS radio and television shows to have a surgeon patch up an old hip injury suffered in an auto accident 20 years ago.

In Princeton, N.J., science's Grand Old Man Albert Einstein forsook his comfortable, baggy sweater and slacks and dressed up in a neat grey suit to meet the press for a 74th-birthday conference. To reporters, he patiently explained some of the aspects of his lifelong project: the unified-field theory (an attempt to integrate the phenomena of gravitation, magnetism and electricity into one law). He then recalled a simpler discovery made a long time ago: the moment that decided his future as a scientist. It was, he said, the sight of an ordinary compass at the age of five. One of his birthday presents, another honor: the new $10 million medical school to be built by Yeshiva University in The Bronx will be called the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Blonde Actress Eva Gabor, off the Broadway stage since her debut in The Happy Time three years ago, had an audience again. She began as a Manhattan disk jockey on a midnight-to-2 a.m. trick, and, with a well-known guest star, pulled off what the New York Times called "the coup of the season." Wrote TV Critic Jack Gould: "For an hour and a half she made Walter Winchell sound like an ordinary mortal . . . He slowed down his speaking style to where it was usually understandable . . . A number of times he laughed out loud--and at himself."

The annual International Flower Show in Manhattan introduced a new blue-and-yellow hybrid primrose called "The Francesca" in honor of Francesca Lodge, wife of Connecticut's Governor John Lodge.

At a meeting of the local Red Cross nursing service in Washington, Draft Boss Major General Lewis B. Hershey, 59, won a new title: diaper-pinning champ. Hershey, father of four, grandfather of eight, showed his veteran's ability in the swaddling contest which used dolls for models.

Official Washington greeted a familiar visitor: Madame Chiang Kaishek, still pleading the cause of Nationalist China. After a visit to the White House and a conference with the President, photographers saw her later at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The scene: lunch in the Senate dining room, with Madame Chiang sitting between her hosts, Senator Styles Bridges, head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, and House Speaker Joe Martin, and Vice President Richard Nixon playing the position of concentrated right end to the discussion.

In San Francisco, Vincent W. Hallinan, who served five months for contempt of court last year and came out of prison to run as presidential candidate for the Communist-backed, Progressive Party, was in trouble again. The poor man's candidate and his wife were charged with dodging income taxes for the years 1946 through 1950. They had declared an income of $122,577, said the Department of Justice, when the figure was actually $254,742.

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