A columnist on the Manchester Guardian asked old George Bernard Shaw if he had sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram on his escape from the Buergerbraue bombing. Shaw said he had not, but that Chamberlain should have wired Hitler: "Greatly as the British nation regrets your escape, decency obliges the British Government to congratulate you on it."

To celebrate the golden jubilee of Barnard College, Dean Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve asked visiting notables to review their adventures in scholarship, to show students that "It's fun to use your mind." English Professor Marjorie Hope Nicolson of Smith College remembered her elation at discovering the "Conway Letters" (detailing the romance of a Cambridge University philosopher and a beautiful young viscountess) in a chilly Cambridge library: "I wore all the clothes I owned, all the sweaters, all the coats. I wore mittens and gloves and I sat writing and copying those letters, with tears partly of cold and partly of joy running down my face, because that library at Christ Church College had never been heated and it has grown colder by geometrical progression for 500 years."

In Manhattan for Christmas shopping, Mr. and Mrs. Oliva Dionne--ex quintuplets--went to see a musical comedy Too Many Girls.

For three minutes ($29.75) Russian born Cleveland Oilman Abraham ("Abe") Pickus, self-appointed telephone diplomat who thinks he helps world peace by overseas calls to heads of European and Asiatic governments,* talked with Finnish Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko, warning him that Finland must cooperate with Russia or "she will have the same experience as Poland."

In Paris, Vienna-born Composer Oscar Straus, 69 (The Chocolate Soldier), was granted final French citizenship. In London, Rogers S. Lament, Manhattan lawyer, distant relative of Banker Thomas William Lament, took the oath of allegiance to King George VI, began training as an artillery cadet. In a Ukrainian city, Ruth Marie Rubens, 31, Philadelphia woman who went to Russia in 1937 on a forged passport, became U.S.S.R. Citizeness Ruth Friederichnova Boerger. In Manhattan, Elisabeth Rethberg, Metropolitan Opera soprano, received her final papers for U. S. citizenship.*

British Author Stanley Richardson, landing in Manhattan for a lecture tour, was asked for news of Naziphile Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, marooned in Germany and at last reports desperately ill (TIME, Nov. 13). Said he: "Unity is just crazy in love with Hitler. But, boys, don't make the mistake of thinking she is a pathetic figure."

Prison-pallid Dr. James Monroe Smith, convicted ex-president of Louisiana State University, hunched up in a jail bathtub at Baton Rouge, La., tried to commit bloody suicide by slashing his right foot. (It was his second attempt: last July, in the Federal House of Detention at New Orleans, he tried to have bichloride of mercury smuggled to him in an ice cream carton.) Two days later an ambulance carried off ineffectual Convict Smith to Angola State Penitentiary, to begin serving eight to 24 years for forgery.

Al Capone, freed after seven years and six months in California's Alcatraz and Terminal Island Prisons, was whisked across the continent by Federal Agents to Baltimore's Union Memorial Hospital in order to be given malaria. Object: a fever cure of his paresis under the care of Dr. Joseph E. Moore, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine instructor in syphilology.

"Britain may take good heart from the American Civil War when all the heroism of the South could not redeem their cause from the stain of slavery, just as all the courage and skill, which the Germans show in war, will not free them from the reproach of Naziism with its intolerance and brutality," cried Winston Churchill month ago. Vexed, Mrs. Walter D. Lamar, retiring president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, last week retorted: "That insult to the best part of America shows both ignorance and stupidity. . . ." Hastily Mr. Churchill's secretaries rushed off answers to letter-writing Southerners, assured them that Mr. Churchill had meant to draw no "analogy."

After 18 years in a Swiss insane asylum, Dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in 1937 began to show marked improvement, was released last fall, is now living in Adelboden, Switzerland. Last week pictures reached the U. S. showing Nijinsky once more in the normal world: accepting a glass of wine from his wife, Romola, looking speculatively at a bin of vegetables in a Swiss market place, in concerned conversation with friends, smiling warmly (for months at a time he never smiled).

University of California's Dr. Ernest Orlando Lawrence was "proud and happy" to win the Nobel Prize for Physics (TIME, Nov. 20), but said he would not go to Stockholm to get it, because of the dangers of a transatlantic crossing. Said he: "My wife and I have talked it over very carefully and it is perfectly clear to us that it would be unwise.

Announced by North Carolina's Governor Clyde R. Hoey as a member in the North Carolina Cape Hatteras National Seashore Commission was Doris Duke Cromwell. Commission's function: To acquire and turn over to the Federal Government the first exclusively national seashore in the U. S.

Wisconsin's Governor Julius Peter ("Julius the Bust") Heil, who has not made a notable success of governing his own State, astonished the nation by implicitly criticizing his neighbor, Michigan's good-godly Governor Luren Dickinson. Referring to the Chrysler automobile workers' strike, Governor Heil declared: "You've got to use strong methods. I would like to be the Governor of Michigan today."

* He has telephoned Franco, Hitler, Chamberlain and Lebrun. - Recent U. S. citizens: Cinemactresses Luise Rainer, Marlene Dietrich, Dominic Mussolini, second cousin to Benito.

* Still waiting for U. S. citizenship: Labor Leader Harry Bridges, German exiles Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.