I WANT the world to know there can be no compromise." So ran one of the last messages scribbled by Premier Imre Nagy in the bloody days of November 1956, when Soviet tanks were stamping out the last flames of the Hungarian revolt, and Nagy himself was a subject of a TIME cover that never ran (see cut). Last week the world learned that there had indeed been no compromise--either on the part of Imre Nagy or on the part of Nikita Khrushchev. The reasons for Nagy's obduracy in not confessing before his execution were simple and heroic; those of Khrushchev were neither. For what the West knows--and for what it can only guess--about Khrushchev's motives, see FOREIGN NEWS, The Cause of Murder.

HUNGARY and the Middle East have a way of coming alive together, just as they did when the revolt in Budapest and the attack on Suez coincided. Last week the U.N. was once again moving in observers to ensure Middle East peace, and there was talk of whether the U.S. might have to go to the rescue in Lebanon. The U.S. was not eager to: it was in fact the fifth and least attractive of remedies. See FOREIGN NEWS, Five Stages to Peace.

REACHING for superlatives in the hit song of his Broadway musical, Anything Goes, in 1934, Songster Cole Porter forged an unusual link between popular music and great art, wrote: "You're the top, you're the Louvre Museum." While France is considerably less than she was 24 years ago, the Louvre is still the top. Last January, over lunch in Manhattan with visiting Louvre Chief Curator Germain Bazin, TIME editors began laying the groundwork for a comprehensive report on the Louvre and its great collection, to be keyed to a two-volume study of the museum being published this year. Photographer Eric Schaal was sent from Switzerland to take color photos of the Louvre masterworks, found himself up against rigid regulations limiting photographers to two lights (of not more than 250 watts) at a distance of more than ten feet. To make faithful reproductions of the paintings, Schaal worked long hours at night in the empty galleries. For Part I of the results, to be followed next week with four pages in color of the Louvre's Jeu de Paume collection of impressionist paintings, see ART, Masterpieces of the Louvre.*

*In 1957 (Feb. 4 and Feb. 11) TIME published a similar two-part survey of the collection in Leningrad's Hermitage.

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