On Desert Island Discs, a popular BBC radio program that asks celebrities what books and records they would want with them on the proverbial desert island, the questions were put to Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, 82. No problem with the book. Montgomery unhesitatingly chose his own History of Warfare, emphasizing that its most valuable passages deal with "how we could stop people fighting." That question is now foremost in his mind. Asked to choose his favorite disc, the old soldier could not decide between The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Oh, For the Wings of a Dove.

His release just before Christmas seemed to gladden every heart, and the newspapers were full of nostalgia about the man once known as "the Babe Ruth of bank robbers." After 17 years of New York's Attica State Prison (and a lifetime total of more than 35 years in jail), Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, a tired, sick old man of 68, was ready with some wistful reminiscing of his own. "People don't seem to want to work hard for anything any more," said Willie. "Years ago, cons used to approach me in various prison yards and ask me to lay out a bank job for them. But not lately. These young kids don't believe in hard work." Though Sutton's own hard work may have netted him as much as $2,000,000, all he had when he left Attica was a prison-earnings check for $169.37.

Forecasters ruled out a white Christmas, but at least the halls of Turville Grange could be decked with some traditional English greenery. In quest of holiday firs, Lee Radziwill and Jackie Onassis led long-haired daughters, sons and dogs out onto the windy meadows near Henley-on-Thames. Besides evergreens, they found what Jackie always finds--a waiting photographer. He caught the sisters Bouvier, hair streaming, in a classic country-life tableau.

There is one sure test of the relative success of U.S. pacification efforts in Viet Nam: Will the brass let Bob Hope sleep there? Apparently not. The U.S.O.'s perennial Santa Claus, now on his 19th Christmas tour, is whisked away each night to the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Though Terence Cardinal Cooke and other distinguished visitors have been billeted in Viet Nam this year and Bob himself insists that the Bangkok base is just "cheaper and easier," it seems that morale-conscious headquarters will never risk the loss of Hope if they can help it.

The stained-glass glories of Louis IX's exquisite Sainte-Chapelle framed a special service that one guest called "visually the most beautiful Christmas Eve Mass I've ever been to." With permission from France's Minister of Culture, U.S. Ambassador Sargent Shriver invited friends, fellow diplomats and their families to worship in the tiny national museum on Paris' Ile de la Cite. The celebrants wore vestments designed by Matisse, and the Met's Anna Moffo sang sacred music at what may well have been the first midnight Mass at Sainte-Chapelle since the time of Louis XIV. It was celebrated in relative comfort. Leaving no detail to chance, Shriver had ordered the usually damp and chilly 13th century chapel to be heated two days in advance.

Vatican officials were taken with an anonymously donated portrait of a handsome young man in a windblown, cassocklike robe. In their eyes, it symbolized a devoted missionary priest, and they hung the painting near Pope Paul's own likeness in the press room of the Holy See. It had been in place more than a month when someone noted that the young priest bore a suspicious resemblance to the figure in a Red Chinese propaganda poster. The artist, a little investigation revealed, had copied a portrait of Chairman Mao as a youth of 27, striding through Kiangsi province in China's traditional gentleman's robe.

On another front, the Vatican suffered a more acute embarrassment. Rome's T-7, a weekly entertainment magazine, conducted a poll of 300 journalists and 3,000 of its readers to select Italy's Man of the Year. Pope Paul finished second, but it was a discouraging second. In first place, with 2,277 votes to the Pope's 314, was the Socialist Deputy Loris Fortune of Udine, who wrote and sponsored the first divorce bill ever passed by Italy's Chamber of Deputies.

Even a guru has to put up with an occasional dressing-down from his dad. Allen Ginsberg, 43, and his father Louis, 74, were doing one of their tandem poetry readings in Miami when Allen's pro-drug comments ("I am turned on more often than I watch television") drove the elder Ginsberg to prose. "Shame on you, Allen," he interrupted, pointing at his bushy-bearded boy. "You are the guru of the flower generation, and you keep telling them to smoke pot and use LSD, knowing they can get in trouble with the police. You set a bad example." Allen, for once, sat speechless.

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