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

Back from an international writers' conference in Tokyo and proud of his brief speech on the role of the writer ("I said the writer's role was to write, not to talk; then I sat down"), Novelist John (The Wayward Bus) Steinbeck, 55, discussed his current work-in-progress: a three-volume "conversion" into modern English of the Arthurian cycle, "a robust tale" that "Tennyson and other poets took pains to clean up." Said Steinbeck: "I haven't the faintest idea what obscenity means, and I don't think anyone else does either," but he quickly added that when his book appears, "I imagine the prurient will have a field day."

Back in their Mediterranean palace after a long summer holiday in Switzerland, Monaco's Prince Rainier and Princess Grace announced "a happy event" for March. If their second child is a boy, as they hope, a name is on tap: Gregoire Georges Pierre Richard.

Talking to American Legion conventioneers in Atlantic City, General Mark Clark, wartime United Nations commander in Korea, now president of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., proposed a soldier's solution for juvenile delinquents: summer camps on U.S. military posts. Exposed to the healthful influence of "tough sergeants," said Clark, the youngsters could "learn to swim, learn to shoot, learn to sit in an airplane, learn to climb in and out of tanks, learn to sail a boat, and all the other fine things we'd like our kids to know." Then Clark returned home, where a surprise pre-football rally on his lawn by Citadel cadets made him feel so good that he lifted his blonde wife Maurine right off the ground.

Speaking to London's Sunday Observer, French Jack-Of-All-Arts Jean Cocteau, 68, who began his career as an avant-garde poet, is ending it an Academician, declared: "The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head."

In disgrace with fortune and men's eyes but luckier than the victims of a former regime, former Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitri T. Shepilov, like Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Georgy Malenkov before him, was banished to the new Soviet purgatory for the once mighty: a trivial job on the frontier of nowhere. Shepilov's humiliation: a teacher's post at Frunze in remote, mountainous Kirghizia.

Standing unrecognized in a London crowd with a newspaper serving as a hat against the rain, Cinemaker Walt Disney, on a busman's holiday with his wife, watched the mounting of the guard at Horse Guards Parade, gathering new ideas on an old subject for Disneyland.

Converging on the Municipal Theater in Tulsa for joint concerts next month, as Oklahoma celebrates its 50th anniversary of statehood, were four internationally famed ballerinas, Qklahomans all, and all of Indian descent: Rosella Hightower of the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet, Marjorie Tallchief of the Paris Opera Ballet, her sister Maria Tallchief of the New York City Ballet, and Yvonne Chouteau of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Scheduled to sing with the San Francisco Opera Company in Lucia and Macbeth, with thousands of tickets sold weeks in advance, Manhattan-born Soprano Maria Callas was reached in Milan, after days of trying via transatlantic telephone, announced on the eve of the opera season that she wanted to cut the number of performances, and postpone their dates. The temperamental diva was promptly fired.

Taking the cure at Baden-Baden with a princely retinue of 90 friends, relatives and retainers, all male (TIME, Sept. 23), Saudi Arabia's oil-rich King Saud took time away from the healing waters to sip tea, and time from sipping tea to sign his autograph for an admirer.

Understandably reluctant to let tax collectors get at his fortune (estimated at $500 million), the late Aga Khan may have outsmarted himself and deprived his heirs of millions. While much of the half-billion was stored in such tax havens as Lichtenstein, Tangier and Switzerland, his heirs, according to a Paris gossipist, are hunting for the balance of about $100 million in safety deposit vaults of banks around the world, where the Aga often made deposits under assumed names, and in many investments--stocks, plantations, mines, real estate--that he made in the names of trusted go-betweens whose identities he alone knew.

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