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

Setting aside his drawing tools for a moment, Britain's best-known cartoonist, aging (65) David Low, writing for the New York Times Magazine, deplored, from a caricaturist's viewpoint, the post-Stalin decline of "the cult of personality." Lamented Low: "There has been a steady decline in striking personality as compared with pre-war yesterday, with its Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Gandhi, Churchill, Roosevelt and company . . . Eisenhower offers opportunities, certainly, with his curiously shaped skull and short, wide face, but nobody could say he was a cartoonist's delight . . . Things are even worse with the British. If you found Anthony Eden and Hugh Gaitskell sitting across from you in a train, you probably wouldn't look at either of them twice."

When he ran for re-election in 1954, Rhode Island's sprightly Democratic Senator Theodore Francis Green got mad, as Democrats will, at the Republicans. "They said I was too old to run for Senator again, and that people would vote against me," he recalls. "I said I had made up my mind to serve until I am 100, and that ended that!" In London last week, after ten days in Paris as a NATO conference delegate, Senator Green, 89, became "he oldest man ever to serve in the Congress, surpassing the record of North Carolina's late Democratic Representative Robert ("Muley") Doughton, whose term ended in 1953 when Doughton was 89 years 56 1/2 days. Then, thanking lots of walking and other exercise for his longevity, Eldest Statesman Green, a bachelor who drinks an occasional cocktail and smokes not even cornsilk, rushed to West Germany and a banquet honoring him as the oldest living ex-student of the University of Bonn.

More than five years after the death of Press Lord William Randolph Hearst, executors of his estate filed the final accounting of its assets: $59,505,638.50, most of which will go to the William Randolph Hearst Foundation (which promotes sundry good works exclusively in the U.S. and its possessions).

Looking like an uneasy fugitive from a Frans Hals painting, U.S. Ambassador to West Germany James B. Conant, 63, dolled himself up in traditional Renaissance plumage, then proudly accepted an honorary Doctor of Natural Science degree from the University of Hamburg. Harvard's former Prexy Conant, whose sheepskins could cover a large flock, now boasts more than 40 honorary diplomas.

Baseball's newest immortal, New York Yankee Hurler Don Larsen, 27, who last October pitched the only perfect game in World Series history, finally got around to paying his estranged wife, mother of his 16-month-old daughter, some $400 in support arrears. Then Vivian Larsen, a former Baltimore telephone operator married to Larsen last year, dropped her separation suit against him, thus unfroze Larsen's $8,714.76 share of series money.

At his Hyde Park Gate home in London, Sir Winston Churchill, physically feeble and mentally overwhelming, turned 82, presided over a small family party that included an assault on a spectacular cake topped off with 82 candles shaped in Sir Winston's "V" for victory trademark. When photographers outside clamored for him, Churchill came to a window with wife Clementine and gap-toothed grandchild Arabella. 7, daughter of Randolph. After posing indoors for other lensmen, Churchill heard a game try at felicitation from one. "Sir Winston," called the photographer, "I hope to take your picture on your hundredth birthday!" The old man turned and regarded the well-wisher with a scorching glare leavened with a trace of a smile. "I see no reason why you shouldn't, young man," rumbled he. "You look hale and hearty enough!"

Free to speak frankly over Congress' perennial failure to cough up adequate funds for Foreign Service personnel, retiring U.S. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce told a Manhattan audience that such legislative parsimony is "folly to the point of national suicide." Said Mrs. Luce: "When you think of the billions that we have spent abroad to prevent our own atomic annihilation, it seems folly to deny a comparatively small sum to the very service which is working hardest to prevent it."

Away from it all for three weeks at a seaside bungalow called "Goldeneye" on Jamaica's north coast, Britain's crisis-weary Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden tried to forget all about the Suez Canal and environs by listening to the personalized serenade of a local calypso band. Sample of the topical lyrics sung to him:

No more Nasser's crimes, But ever beautiful Jamaica rhymes. Jamaicans hope you'll be contented, and Taking that infidel for granted, Now we hope you'll enjoy your stay Down in Oracabessa Bay.

Meanwhile, in London, the Laborite Daily Mirror announced an essay contest on the question of what course Britain should now take in the Suez area. Irreverent prize promised the winning essayist: three weeks in Jamaica.

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