"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:

Elizabeth Eastdown, of Higham, England, celebrated her 82nd birthday last week. The event would undoubtedly have been overlooked by the press but for the fact that she was once maidservant to Author Charles Dickens and celebrated her birthday by showing visitors a tea set he gave her.

George Arliss, British actor, complete with dangling monocle, baggy tweeds, traveling tea basket, parrot ("Dink"), and the world's most monumental valet (George Jenner), entrained last week in Manhattan for Hollywood, where he will make for Warner Bros, talking pictures of his two great stage successes, The Green Goddess and Disraeli. Actor Arliss had just completed a five-month transcontinental tour as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (TIME, March 18).

Mulino von Kluck, 17, tall, blue-eyed, blonde, granddaughter of the General whose advance on Paris was rolled back by Foch at the Marne (see p. 26), has gone into cinema. Her first part will be in 1813, a film about Germany's liberation from the grip of Napoleon. She will, she says, never visit Paris.

Thornton Niven ("Bridge of San Luis Rey") Wilder threw light upon his past work, and perhaps suggested the nature of future accomplishment, when he announced last week to fiction-conscious Bostonians that: "Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

William McAndrew, ousted superintendent of Chicago public schools, who sued Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago for libel ($250,000), is now in Europe. Last week, the case appeared in Chicago courts, was dismissed for want of prosecution.

George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to the London Observer, published last week, said: "May I beg my worshipers not to scramble too blindly for alleged Shaviana? Otherwise they may share the fate of one of their number in America who just paid $1,500 for a copy of Locke's 'Essay on Human Understanding.'" The "Essay" was advertised as being profusely annotated by Shaw. But the annotations were those of Shaw's father-in-law, Horace Payne-Townshend of Derry County, Cork. Satirist Shaw has never read the "Essay," and he does "not disfigure books by underlining them." His practice "is to make a very light dot in the margin with a pencil-tip and note the page number on the end of a slip of paper."

As Fleming H. Revell Jr., wealthy-Manhattan church publisher, onetime Yale sprinter (100 yds. in 9 1/3 sec.), issued with his 16-year-old daughter Muriel from the house of his octogenarian father, he was attacked by "my wife, a large, strapping woman." He pushed her aside, dodged her chauffeur, one William Kiefer (named as co-respondent in Mr. Revell's suit for divorce) and sprinted. Near 5th Avenue a burly man caught and held him. Mrs. Revell caught up and renewed her attack with nail, fist, tooth, and then had Mr. Revell arrested for assault. Said he: "The incident was a stunt on the part of my wife to embarrass me and carry out her threat to not only ruin my reputation but break me."

John D. Rockefeller Jr. last week wiped the village of Eastview off the map of New York, by outright purchase of that once flourishing Colonial hamlet on the outskirts of Tarrytown. Mr. Rockefeller paid more than $700,000 for the privilege of ousting 46 families, so that the new main line of the Putnam division of the New York Central R.R. may run along what was once Eastview's main street, instead of through the Rockefeller estate, "Pocantico Hills." At the same time he rid his vicinity of a mushroom congerie of dance halls, picnic groves, gas stations. The village, including houses built when Peter Stuyvesant peg-legged it along the leafy Bouwerie, is to be razed by May 1. The only Eastview buildings to be spared in Rockefeller Land are: "Low-erre," summer home of Chainstorekeeper James Butler; the Westchester County poorhouse; the Tarrytown pumping station.*

* Another wholesale-village-purchaser is Banker Frank Arthur Vanderlip who, a decade ago, bought century-old Sparta, near Scarberouah-on-Hudson, to rid himself of unwanted neighbors.