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

Inspectors in the Beverly Hills, Calif, post office, raking through the mails for obscene material, triumphantly found a naughty volume sent from England to a local bookseller. The offending pornographer: Aristophanes. The intercepted work: Lysistrata, that gay old tale of how the wives of Athens, trying to force their menfolk into calling off a war, stage a mass boudoir lockout. At week's end, the post office hinted that it might let this lascivious matter pass, provided that the bookseller would produce an affidavit from some library, artist, writer, museum or private collector interested in buying the book (available in almost any U.S. bookstore) for its value as a classic.

With an entourage of equipment-laden TV film men, Maine's handsome Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith took off for a round of Western European capitals, plus a foray to Moscow. The highlights of her trip will be unreeled later on the CBS-TV program, See It Now, whose guiding star, Commentator Edward R. Marrow, last week accepted the annual Freedom House Award, given to him, in part, for his unwavering public stand against Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joe McCarthy.

In his London Daily Express, Britain's top press tycoon, Nova Scotia-born Lord Beaverbrook, whose ladder of success was firmly planted in faith in the Empire, penned a sorrowful salute to the state of his nation. Wrote the Beaver: "I am leaving for Canada and the West Indies, where I will stay for the winter. Forty years ago, I came in high hope and with great enthusiasm to help in the work for a united Empire. I go in gloom and sorrow. The Empire is now being liquidated, and the British people don't care . . . I have always advocated emigration. To Canada and Australia and the Dominions . . . Now we have emigration, and on such a scale. For Mr. [Anthony] Eden is sending to European countries 120,000 young men of Britain. That is disastrous and disgraceful."

A self-characterized "simple trial lawyer," Joseph N. Welch, a Bostonian whose courtly ways belie his youth in Iowa hog country, turned up at Iowa's Grinnell College, his alma mater ('14), to accept an honorary doctor of laws degree. Welch, special counsel to the Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings, proceeded to debunk himself, to the delight of his cornhusking listeners, on grounds that "I am not actually real." Welch's expose of Welch: "[During the hearings], when I sat stunned and speechless, you said, 'What patience the man has.' When I sat in an agony of indecision, you said, 'How wise he is. He must be planning some deeply wonderful move.' Sometimes I was so weary that my mind was almost a blank. And then [when I spoke], some of you would say, 'How witty he is!' "

TV's aggressively charming Pianist Liberace, 34, whose best friend has always been his mother, proclaimed to his panting public that he is "still a free man," has no immediate plans to marry a nightclub dancer named Joanne Rio, whom he met four years ago in a Hollywood church. "I have to wait out the projects." giggled he. "Another year won't make me an old man." No sooner did he thus spike rumors of romance than one of his other projects panned out. An Oklahoma oil well, half-owned by Liberace and his ever-present brother George, blew itself in, began flowing at a heartening 100 barrels an hour.

Welterweight (5 ft. 4 in., 140 Ibs.) Publisher Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden, 86, came out on the wrong end of an impromptu brawl with a heavyweight visitor to his Manhattan office. The intruder: his son Berwyn, 30, a physically cultured brute (6 ft., 190 Ibs.) who blamed his father for causing him to lose his job as a dancing instructor. The elder Macfadden's version: "He came into my office with blood in his eye, and . . . before I knew what was happening, he slapped my face and hit me." Berwyn's story: "He tried to shoot me. He kicked me in the groin. In trying to restrain him, I accidentally poked him in the eye." Of one thing there was no doubt: Octogenarian Macfadden sported a fancy purple shiner.

On the eve of her 70th birthday, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, who relaxed during the past twelve months by scurrying some 50,000 miles to boom the United Nations, sat back and reflected on her bustling life.

Now quite grey and stylishly stouter than she was during her twelve years as the nation's First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt confided that her greatest pleasure now comes from "work . . . and [having] no people dependent on me to take my time." She lives alone in an apartment on Manhattan's East 62nd Street, celebrated her birthday at Hyde Park with all of her children present except Elliott (expected later). For exercise she no longer rides horseback through the Putnam County woods, but often strolls over the countryside with her two Scotties, one a grandson of F.D.R.'s famed Fala. Looking ahead, Eleanor Roosevelt, who has already accumulated 19 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, anticipates lots more of life, no neatly defined hereafter. Said she: "There is some kind of immortality, though I don't know what kind of shape immortality takes. And I don't worry about it."

The happy little band of British Laborites who toured Red China last month got a delayed kick in the pants from their recent hosts. The latest edition of the Reds' Modern Encyclopedia hit the stands. Its strongest venom was saved for recent Peking Guest Aneurin Bevan, farthest left of Britain's top socialists. Nye did not make the grade as a "Foreign Personage" (two who did: party-lining Comedian Charlie Chaplin and Canterbury's Red Dean Hewlett Johnson), but instead was ignominiously lumped with such "Foreign Reactionaries" as his old enemy in the House of Commons, Sir Winston Churchill. The Encyclopedia then hauled off and let Nye have it: "Mr. Bevan wears the outward cloak of Socialism to hide the face of an agent of the bourgeoisie. He hoodwinks the British people, hinders the revolution of the British working man, and is in fact working in the interests of the British capitalists. He, with Mr. [Clement] Attlee, is just another one of the sly badger gang."

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