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

Day after the U.S.S.R. hiked the state-pegged price of vodka, paunchy Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin hoisted a glass at a Moscow embassy reception, quipped to reporters: "We raised the price so you could reduce! People should drink wine more. It's much better for you."

Since she first launched When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain as her beam song in 1931, TV-Radioriole Kate Smith has turned the lunar trick some 10,000 times. This week Kate will at last put her Moon in limbo. On her new MBS radio show she will open by warbling Swonderful, fade away with By Myself. Said she of Moon: "I've simply grown tired of hearing the song."

Turning 80 this week on his North Carolina goat farm, Poet-Biographer Carl Sandburg anticipated living to be 88, maybe even 99. Cried he: "It's inevitable, it's inexorable, it's written in the Book of Fate!" Reason: two of his great-grandfathers and one of his grandfathers expired at ages divisible by eleven.

Cornered in Hollywood by a persevering newsman, Cinemale Marlon (Sayonara) Brando chose to speak on an actor's right to privacy: "It's not a matter of being entitled to privacy--it's an absolute requisite. The trouble is, everyone's life in this country is public property. Anyone who objects to the intrusion of his private life is considered to be idiosyncratic, bizarre, uncooperative and dishonest." Uncooperatively, Brando would mumble not a word about his marriage or his pregnant wife, Variable Starlet Johanna ("Anna Kashfi") O'Callaghan Brando, who keeps uncooperatively insisting that she is a Bengalese Indian from Darjeeling (where nobody ever heard the name Kashfi).

Results were in on the annual couture sweepstakes of the New York Dress Institute, and, though the twelve-place list repeated some regulars among the world's most chic, it also cited several newcomers to the derby. Luxuriating in her No. 1 spot for the fifth year in a row was Mrs. William S. Paley, wife of CBS's board chairman, closely trailed by two other perennials, the Duchess of Windsor and supersocial Mrs. Winston Guest. Soon after them came the year's big surprise: Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, making her first appearance in the best-dressed list and more than outdistancing her unmentioned sister, Princess Margaret (tied for No. 9 last year). Among other women saluted for their "distinguished taste in dress without ostentation or extravagance": wispy Cinemite Audrey (Love in the Afternoon) Hepburn, Mrs. Henry Ford II, Cinemactress Claudette Colbert, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Jr.

For her New Year honors list, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II tapped some 2,200 subjects of the British Commonwealth for tribute. Elevated to the baronage, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, former governor of strife-torn Cyprus. As Commander Order of the British Empire, London-born (as Alice Marks) Prima Ballerina Alicia Markova, 47, long renowned for her Giselle; to the knighthood, Author-Biologist Julian Huxley, onetime director-general of UNESCO. The world featherweight boxing champion, Nigeria's Hogan ("Kid") Bassey, 25, learned that he had flailed his way to another laurel--Member of the Order of the British Empire.

Jottings From a Writer's Notebook (Dutton; $3) by sententious Author Van Wyck Brooks, 71, nearing his first half-century as an ever-flowering sage, essayist and literary historian, treated readers to some lively odds and ends of fact and philosophy. Nugget: "How many books can any man read? A supposedly well-informed journalist has written that Hitler undoubtedly read most of the 7,000 military books in his library. So Lawrence of Arabia was said to have read at Oxford most of the 40,000 books in the library of his college. So Thomas Wolfe allegedly devoured 20,000 books or so...How tiresome, all this, and how untrue...For the last 20 years I have been obliged to read on an average six or seven hours a day. I have certainly read far more than these others have had time for, in the short periods referred to, and how many books have I read in these 20 years? Something less than 6,000, I think, less than a book a day."

In Hollywood, during a brief slip into the meandering footprints of his late convivial father, Actor John Barrymore Jr., 25, was nabbed for being drunk and disturbing the peace at 1 a.m. while tiffing with wife Cara in his parked car. He drew a $100 fine and a 90-day jail stretch that was suspended provided he spends his next three weekends in jail. Said Junior later: "I tried some rum concoctions and they tasted like punch. They didn't act that way. I'm through with liquor!"

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