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

Harry Truman, who once threatened to punch Washington Post Musicritic Paul Hume in the nose after Hume hinted that Daughter Margaret's voice was maybe not operatic, went in for some critic's art himself. Reviewing a record album (The Confederacy, Columbia SL-220, $10) for The Saturday Review, Critic Truman found its songs and readings "excellent." After that, Truman happily digressed to one of his favorite pastimes--a folksy War-Between-the-States history lesson, second-generation style. "When I listened to the record I could see [Confederate General James E.] Jeb Stuart with his plumed hat and redlined cape galloping around [Union General George] McClellan during the Peninsular Campaign . . . the incomparable Robert E. Lee at Fredericksburg . . . Appomattox Court House and Marse Robert's ride to Richmond . . . Then I thought of the terrible Reconstruction and old Thad Stevens and Ben Wade, who wanted Andrew Johnson kicked out so he could be the President."

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Famed Viennese Conductor Erich Kleiber, 64, again learned that totalitarians always prostitute art to political dogma, again quit his job as director of the (East) Berlin State Opera (he first resigned in 1935, in protest against the Nazis), fled with his California-born wife Ruth to West Germany. Immediate reason for his break with the Reds: the inscription across the facade of the opera building, "King Frederick [in dedication to] Apollo and the Muses," had arbitrarily been ordered removed.

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At a ball feting French air cadets in Sweden's university city of Uppsala, Lieut. General Axel Ljungdahl, chief of the Swedish air force, executed some fancy foot maneuvers with the eldest daughter of King Gustaf VI Adolf, glamorous Princess Margaretha, 20, one of Scandinavia's most eligible bachelor girls.

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As one of Britain's top satirists, Stephen Potter, 55, in his puckish tomes on Lifemanship and Gamesmanship, has extolled the advantages of "oneupmanship" , (i.e., the use of the ploy, and the art of getting away with it). As one of Britain's top experts on courtship, Marriage Bureaucrat Heather Jenner, 39, in a recent bestseller called Marriage Is My Business, claims to have arranged some 5,000 successful matings. As a result of indoctrinating her clients with some mystical principles of reciprocal oneupmanship, only three of those matches, testifies Heather, have ended in divorce. Last week, however, a gentleman farmer from Kent, Michael Cox, seemed to have both Spouse Sponsor Jenner (real name: Heather Cox) and Humorist Potter one-down. In a forthright, lifemanly ploy, Farmer Cox sued Heather for divorce on grounds of adultery (uncontested), named Stephen Potter as corespondent.

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In a leisurely weekend of social fun and political games at the executive mansion in Albany, New York's Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman and his guest, Chicago Lawyer Adlai Stevenson, greeted each other, smilingly discovered their neckties were of the same color and design. Asked whether he thought that President Eisenhower would run for reelection in 1956, Stevenson, always cagy about his own political future, replied: "I suspect he will." Later, the two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination next year (although Harriman is still on record as favoring Stevenson) put their heads together privately, compared designs on the White House.

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From his uproarious retirement in California, aging (76) Author Upton (The Jungle) Sinclair, long one of America's loudest social consciences, took an ad in New Republic magazine to thunder a special plea. Sinclair, a lifelong teetotaler, was trying to unearth "a publisher who believes in abstention." In a "terrible but rigidly truthful" book titled Enemy in the Mouth, Abstainer Sinclair had "told the tragic stories of 50 alcoholic writers." Their suicide rate was ten times the U.S. norm, their lives 15 years less than the average span. After mentioning four dead drunkards in his own family (including his father), Upton Sinclair sorrowfully listed a surprising roll of fallen slaves "to John Barleycorn."

Wrote he: "For three-quarters of a century it has been my fate to watch . . . a long string of friends . . . traveling to their graves by the alcoholic highway: Jack London, George Sterling, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Millay, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. Woodward, F. P. Dunne (Mr. Dooley), Horace Liveright, Eugene Debs, Douglas Fairbanks, Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Klaus Mann." And, lamented Sinclair, the roster of hard drinkers among the illustrious he knew through letters or friends was even longer. Among those departed: "Stephen Crane, James Whitcomb Riley, Heywood Broun, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin A. Robinson, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Wolfe, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, John Barrymore, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Dylan Thomas." Concluded Sinclair: "After wasting a year trying to please publishers, I am making this appeal to the conscience of my country. [Who] will make this book available to those who want it?"

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After a recent issue of France's longhaired movie magazine. Cahiers du Cinema, came out, crammed from cover to cover with drooling eulogies of Britain's famed Director Alfred (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window) Hitchcock, Cahiers' English counterpart, Sight and Sound--not loving Hitchcock less, but resenting Cahiers' adulation more--blew its top: "Hitchcock is compared with Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Bernanos, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hardy, Richardson, Poe (a "classical" poet, apparently), Meredith, Homer, Aeschylus, Corneille, Balzac and Shakespeare! More marvelous still, all this is done on the strength of a handful of Hitchcock's American films." With smarmy smugness, S. & S. quoted the finale of Hitchcock's tape-recorded interview: "Really."' asked the Cahiersman, "you don't like your American films?" Smiling and shaking his interviewer's hand. Hitchcock allowed: "Not really." Not loving Hitchcock less, but resenting S. & S.'s mockery more. Cahiers, for its current issue, interviewed football-shaped Alfred Hitchcock all over again. Had he really, honestly confessed that his American films were bad? Replied the director: "No, no. That's not true!" His interrogator pounced: "But you did say it! Why?" Weaseled Hitchcock uneasily: "It depends what press it was. In London, for example, certain journalists want me to tell them that everything that comes from America is bad." Then, desperately striving to smooth the ruffled feathers all round, Hitchcock all but wrung the neck of the matter: "What I shall say is that some of my American films are a compromise--on account of the public."

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