August Poetess Dame Edith Sitwell,

75, boasts a lineage that goes back to England's Plantagenet kings (1154-1485) and a memory that goes back almost as far. Last week, when she opened an invitation from one Villiers David to a showing of his watercolors, the name struck a familiar chord. In a twinkling, Dame Edith recalled that 28 long years ago, the obscure artist wrote an obscure poem called "A Satiric Preface to a Film":

Let bogus poets first apologise,

Control their vanity, confess their lies . . .

Has any man who's ever read a line

Discovered meaning yet in Gertrude Stein?

At least the Sitwells trumpet their intent:

Not verse that's just, but just Advertisement . . .

For this ancient act of lese majesty, Dame Edith took pen in blue-veined hand, rattled her Tibetan bracelets and administered a crushing snub to Villiers David. Wrote she: "I am surprised that after your insolent references to myself, Sir Osbert and Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell [her younger brother] made in verse some years ago, you should have the impudence to invite me to waste my time at your show."

A big man with big plans donned top hat and swallow-tailed coat and, surrounded by an escort of sword-bearing Indian guards, called at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi. U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, a shade under 7 ft. tall in his topper (6 ft. 8 in. without it), could hardly have picked a more propitious moment to meet with Indian officials: the U.S. was about to offer $1 billion for basic development projects over the next two years if the other members of the "Aid to India Club," Britain, Canada, West Germany and Japan, matched the contribution. If the scheme materializes, Galbraith may be able to tackle a pet embassy project, building a nuclear power plant and a giant steel mill that would dwarf a similar, propaganda-packed Soviet showpiece.

The Lenin Peace Prizes, awarded on May Day eve, honored a couple of unlikely apostles of tranquillity last week: Cuba's Premier Fidel Castro and Guinea's President Sekou Toure. To Toure the prize seemed something of a lefthanded compliment. "We are not Communists," he proclaimed, but he accepted anyway. Castro, not a bit abashed, announced that he might rush right off to Moscow to pick up his 25,000 rubles ($27,750), added with uncharacteristic modesty that he thought of the prize "not as a personal award, but as an unmatched and great honor for our people."

Oh, it's perfectly clear

That there's change when the critics forgather.

Last year was a Hawthorne year.

Coming up--Willa Gather?

Maybe next year. But this was Phyllis McGinley year as the critics forgathered to award the veteran poet (and author of the stanza above) the $500 Pulitzer Prize for her ninth volume of poetry, Times Three. For Miss McGinley, 56, brisk, scalpel-sharp suburban housewife and mother of two daughters, the award was deserved recognition after three decades of recording human foibles in barbed verse: "I'm probably the only Pulitzer Prize poet that never had poems in the Kenyan Review or the Partisan Review. I've always been up in the slicks." To another lady of letters, modest, easygoing, Alabama-born Harper Lee, 35, went a Pulitzer for her first novel of life in a Southern town, To Kill a Mockingbird. It was handsome recompense for "the long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over," writing much of it, moreover, on a golf course in her home town. Claims Miss Lee: "In Monroeville [Ala.], well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you on the golf course."

Normally a hearty, informal talker, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, who retires May 31 as Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a brief, businesslike speech to the Convocation of Canterbury in his final address as president last week, but hinted that he might have more to say another day. "Who knows," asked Dr. Fisher, "whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book."

In Gettysburg last week, Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen happened to mention the Washington Post while chatting with ex-President Dwight Eisenhower. "The Post," mused Eisenhower, reflecting on a newspaper that seldom had a kind word to say about his Administration, and whose staff cartoonist, Herbert ("Herblock") Block, habitually drew Ike as a grinning imbecile. "I don't know why you fellows insist on reading that paper. The eight years I was in the White House I would not allow that paper in there. In fact, one day I wanted to read, and there was nothing to read but the Washington Post. So they tore out the sport page and gave it to me."

Taking part in London's latest weekend sport, anti-nuclear sitdowns, Playwright Shelagh (A Taste of Honey) Delaney and Actress Vanessa (The Lady from the Sea) Redgrave, daughter of Actor Sir Michael Redgrave, sat down in the middle of busy Whitehall, were hoisted from the pavement by embarrassed bobbies, and carted off in paddy wagons to a police station along with 824 other demonstrators. Both women later paid -L-i ($2.80) fines in Bow Street Police Court. The most amusing note of the whole performance, said Vanessa, was the fact that two streetwalkers who preceded her to the magistrate's bench "paid exactly the same fine" for soliciting.

Cloaked in the cardinal-and-white hood and sable robes of a Cornell Ph.D. for his installation as chancellor of the University of Chicago, Nobel prizewinning Geneticist Dr. George W. Beadle (TIME cover, Jan. 2) proposed a sure way for keeping outside support of education from turning into outside control. Set up an "independence fund," suggested Beadle, so schools can "say no to any proposal for Government--or private--support that threatens our independence."

Asked about his favorite U.S. vacation spot, Cartoonist Charles (Monster Rally) Addams gave Town & Country Magazine a reply that left the city fathers of Tucson, Ariz., wondering whether they had been panned or praised. Said Addams, whose macabre drawings feature a ghoul-infested mansion occupied by a gaunt female vampire, a fat male fiend and a child ogre: "I have never been there, but from what I hear, it sounds like my kind of town."

Talking to Washington newsmen, grizzled Yankee Poet Robert Frost, 87, wanted to be sure they got one thing straight: "The newspapers are always comparing my hair with Carl Sandburg's. That's absurd. Carl has a hairdo, and I cut my own."

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