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

After grappling with two ghostwriters on the issue of how memorable her memoirs should be (TIME, Oct. 17), the Duchess of Windsor joined the dwindling list of do-it-yourself autobiographers, sailed for Paris to take pen in hand, "starting from scratch," in tracing her own rise from Baltimore. Her new title for the yarn, slated to begin serialization in McCall's magazine next March: The Heart Has Its Reasons.

The county fathers of Los Angeles tardily (by three weeks) honored a famed local citizen's 70th birthday, handed a plaque to prodigious Popularizer Will (The Story of Philosophy) Durant, hailed in bronze as "the best known of all the living interpreters of great periods and personalities in history." Shucking off such acclaim, Dr. Durant expertly served up interpretations of two personalities: "I'd say the greatest living philosopher is Bertrand Russell, the greatest historian is Arnold Toynbee." Asked about the mixed blessing of a long life, he philosophized: "I envy Marlene Dietrich because apparently she has been able to defy age. On the other hand, I have more fun writing than looking at Miss Dietrich. To live forever would be about the greatest curse imaginable!"

With half an hour to go one evening during her vigorous portrayal of Joan of Arc in The Lark, Broadway's Actress Julie Harris (TIME, Nov. 28) threw herself into an all-too-real fall onstage, split her lip in sideswiping a footstool. The curtain was rung down for ten minutes, while three doctors recruited from the audience made temporary repairs on Julie. Then, amidst bravos, she finished the play. After that, Julie had eight stitches made in her lip, was almost as good as new at next day's matinee.

Bound for Stuttgart airport on a fog-shrouded Autobahn, a bus carrying Germany's Pianist Walter Gieseking, 60, crashed into a bridge abutment at 70 m.p.h., brought death to two of its 18 passengers. One of the dead: Gieseking's wife Anna Maria, 66. Famed Musician Gieseking, removed from Allied blacklists in 1946 after his eleven years as an unreluctant performer under Hitler, sustained "serious" head injuries but no hurt to the hands that have made him famous.

The nation's highest-piled governor (6 ft. 8 in.), Alabama's James E. ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom, autocratically took off to qualify also as the highest-flying. His recent ploy, now under investigation by the Air Force: commandeering Alabama's National Guard airplanes to haul Kissin' Jim and his cronies to one of this fall's football games. On New Year's Eve, the Alabama Polytechnic Institute team will take on Vanderbilt University in the "Gator" Bowl game at Jacksonville, Fla. Kissin' Jim plans to be there, free-loaded, with room for a mighty entourage of playmates. Last week, however, anticipating stiff crosswinds from Washington, Folsom decided to brazen it out, announced the flight schedule for one of the South's greatest peacetime air armadas. "Under my power as Commander in Chief of the Alabama Air National Guard, I am ordering every jet, every C-47 and everything that can roll on wheels, much less, fly, to fly over Jacksonville Dec. 31 in a special weather mission," thundered he. "I hear that the Florida runways are in bad shape and need to be inspected, so these here Alabama planes will give the

Jacksonville runway a landing inspection some time during the morning of Dec. 31 and a take-off inspection that afternoon." Asked if he feared any grounding orders from federal authorities, Folsom, virtually there for the big kickoff already, drawled: "I'm the law around here." But at week's end, an aide of Kissin' Jim's nervously volunteered that he was sure Jester Folsom was just jesting.

Just before entertaining friends and relatives at luncheon in their Hyde Park Gate town house in London, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill, aglow with good spirits, stepped outside briefly to greet sundry well-wishers. "Wave, dear!" said Lady Churchill. In happy compliance, Churchill flashed his famous V-sign to signify his victory that day over 81 momentous years. All week long, post office trucks had brought a mountain of greetings and gifts to Sir Winston. A special messenger, U.S. Ambassador Winthrop W. Aldrich, had personally delivered a birthday present from Dwight Eisenhower: a three-inch gold medallion, struck off in the U.S. Mint, bearing a likeness of Churchill taken from Ike's own portrait of him. On its opposite side, a citation flanked a design of clasped hands between British and U.S. shields: "Presented . . . on behalf of his millions of admiring friends in the United States for leadership and in recognition of his signal services to the defense of freedom."

As some 2,000 Fredericton folks cheered in his adopted home province of New Brunswick, Britain's Ontario-born Lord Beaverbrook, 75, jauntily snipped a red-white-and-blue ribbon, thus opened an early Christmas gift to the locals, a $400,000 skating rink. Performing this duty "with a warm heart in a cold climate," The Beaver was proudly armed with a certificate, presented by Fredericton's mayor, giving him the freedom of the city. Whimsically, Lord Beaverbrook recalled a similar rite: "Some years ago I was given the Order of Suvorov, First Class, in Russia, and I said then . . . does it mean that I have many liberties in Moscow? I was told yes. If you get tight, the policemen are told to take you home rather than to prison. But, I said, I don't get tight. What then? They said, you can ride on the tramcars free. But, I said, I am not in Moscow to ride on the tramcars. What then? You may have an annuity of $1.25 a month. That was the only benefit that I could see that I could get out of the Order of Suvorov."

Soon off to reconnoiter the antarctic for an expedition he will lead there, New Zealand's strapping Sir Edmund Hillary, co-conqueror of Mount Everest, bounced his son Peter on his knee, showed the lad a brogue the size of Noah's ark. Explained Sir Edmund: "The British expedition is supplying us with boots, but I've got such big feet that I don't trust them to have my size, so I'm taking my own."

Dominican Playboy Porfirio Rubirosa moseyed into Bogota, Colombia to make preparations for a genuine treasure hunt. Bracing himself for his safari's plunge into the Choco wilds on Colombia's Pacific Coast, Rubi, out to make the jungle give up some platinum and gold, first tested his luck at a race track, won a cool 9,600 pesos on a 100-to-1 shot. He also took his ease in Bogota's elegantly stuffy Jockey Club, where he complained about the absence of vodka (he thirsted in vain for a Bloody Mary). Colombia's press hailed his expedition with gleeful gibes. Item: a caricature of Rubirosa whiling away his safari time by pinching a beautiful nude Indian maiden. Asked for his slant on honest labor, the Ding Dong Daddy from Santo Domingo yawned languidly: "It's impossible for me to work. I just don't have time."

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