SOMETIMES a subject is both too wide-ranging and too nebulous to be told around one man. In such cases we now turn with greater frequency to such devices as this week's cover by one of Britain's top cartoonists, Illingworth. "My cover won't be a happy one," said Leslie Illingworth, a jolly, 60-year-old Welshman with a John Bullish face, who draws for Punch and London's Daily Mail. He meant his Britannia to be looking a little aghast toward America, not Europe. "We're not anti-American in this country, and we understand the breakaway of the American Revolution, but when the kid comes and belts the old girl across the backside it's a bit much," he says. "We are due for a shakeup. It's salutary and good for us. But it's hard too. It's like a successful son saying, 'Open the windows, mother--God, all that fug.' "

For the story, London Bureau Chief Robert Elson deployed his staff to look into every corner of Britain's life. Parliamentary Correspondent Honor Balfour concentrated on the politicians. Monica Dehn, with two children to educate, had a lively interest in British education. Charles Champlin worked his way through the young satirists and playwrights, and others who are now angry at being called Angry Young Men. His interviews ranged from the Savile Club to Colin MacInnes' bare flat, where they drank scotch-laced coffee and listened to Billie Holiday records to take the chill off a freezing morning. Donald Connery, fresh from the cooler precincts of Moscow, rode the train north to such unemployment spots as Liverpool and Newcastle-on-Tyne. Though Connery's mother was born on the Tyne, he reports, "I have heard more understandable English in Calcutta and Katmandu than in some stretches of North England." Robert Ball, who did the major economic reporting of Britain, had previously reported for many years in postwar Germany. "Most of what I have read about Britain in recent years emphasized the changes taking place here," he says. "Perhaps that was why I was surprised, having come from a country of almost total change, to find so little here." To Ball, the rebuilt Germany has an airport-terminal newness and sameness; Britain impresses more by its age and continuity and settled ways ("Where else would a Dickensian wine dealer advise about a '57 Burgundy in kindly but firm tones: 'No news from that one at all yet, I'm afraid'?").

The overall impression of our London staff, providing a theme for our cover story, is of a nation in trouble, but vigorous in its self-examination. In New York, the story was written by Michael Demarest and edited by Edward Hughes.

SO far, 1963 has had an auspicious beginning for TIME. Our worldwide circulation topped 3,600,000, and the Jan. 11 issue reached a new circulation high in the U.S.: 2,920,000.

Right now, the newspaper strikes in New York and Cleveland have whetted the demand for TIME, and in the New York City area alone, 50,000 added copies are being sold each week. But TIME's newsstand circulation--always a useful index of a magazine's vitality--has been extraordinarily healthy right along. The December average sale was 28% ahead of December 1961, and each weekly issue since last June has outsold the corresponding issue of the year before.

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