TELEVISION

Wednesday, November 11

CBS REPORTS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Both Nationalist China's and Red China's positions in the world are assessed by India's Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri, Nationalist China's President and Madame Chiang Kaishek, Pakistan's President Ayub Khan, Britain's new Prime Minister Harold Wilson and other leaders.

Thursday, November 12 SOPHIA LOREN IN ROME (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). The beauty that is Italian is on display as Sophia Loren tours the Eternal City. Color.

Friday, November 13 MISS TEEN-AGE AMERICA PAGEANT (CBS, 10-11:30 p.m.). More than 50 adolescent finalists vie for a $10,000 college scholarship and the honor of wearing the Miss Teen-Age America crown.

Saturday, November 14 WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Floyd Patterson analyzes the Nov. 16 Liston-Clay Heavyweight Championship Fight.

ONCE UPON A MATTRESS (CBS, 8:30-10 p.m.). In this musical-comedy adaptation of The Princess and the Pea, Carol Burnett re-creates her off-Broadway role as a swamp girl who swims the castle moat and is courted by a prince. Richard Rodgers' daughter Mary composed the score.

Sunday, November 15 DISCOVERY (ABC, 11:30-12 noon). The mysteries of heredity are explored, showing how chromosomes and genes combine to make some blossoms crimson, some cats calico, and each of us what we are.

PROFILES IN COURAGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The story of Mary S. McDowell, a Latin teacher who, at the beginning of World War I, refused on religious grounds to sign a loyalty oath.

WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Two cartoon productions. The first, Ben and Me, is narrated by a mouse who credits himself with originating many of the inspirations for which Ben Franklin is famous; the second, Peter and the Wolf, is narrated by Sterling Holloway and brings to life Prokofiev's enchanting music. Color.

SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9 p.m. to conclusion). Bird Man of Alcatraz. Burt Lancaster plays Robert Stroud, a convicted murderer whose 43 years of solitary confinement were spent studying and writing about the habits of caged birds.

Tuesday, November 17 THE LOUVRE (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). The greatest of all art treasuries, the Louvre, displays its masterpieces and architectural grandeur. Charles Boyer narrates. Color.

THEATER ON BROADWAY

A SEVERED HEAD, by Iris Murdoch and J. B. Priestley, is a most unusual play to encounter on Broadway. It is a sex farce adapted from a novel by an Oxford University professor of philosophy (Miss Murchdoch), and its true subject is the nature of reality. It is acted with uncommon skill, and it is a delectable repast of fun and thought.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Period songs, sketches, gauze-clad music-hall girls and blown-up film stills have the cumulative impact of an artillery barrage in Joan Littlewood's biting satire on World War I.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Zero Mostel seems almost to physically expand to fill the stage with yeasty joy, pain and mystery in this musical based on Sholem Aleichem's tales of a poor Jewish dairyman, his family and friends in 1905 Russia.

ABSENCE OF A CELLO is a bright, laugh-every-other-minute comedy demonstrating that a free-spirited scientist cannot be stamped into a cog-sized mold.

Off Broadway

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY has been boldly extrapolated from the celebrated James Thurber story. The youngsters have not been cowed by the sanctity of the master, and the clever lyrics, melodically oriented songs and infectious joie de vivre of the cast make this a thoroughly pleasant musical evening.

CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS. A rock-'n'-roll number, I Wanna Hold Your Handel, spoofing the composer and the Beatles, is one of the highlights of this revue imported from the campus on the Cam. The fun flows as seven manic but unassuming Britons set out to tickle a rib rather than wash a brain.

RECORDS

Orchestral

BARTOK: THE MIRACULOUS MANDARIN SUITE (London). Intended for a dance pantomime, this is some of the most unsettling music ever written. A mandarin, lured by a prostitute and mortally stabbed by her accomplices, finds his lust stronger than death and miraculously lives until his passion is spent. Budapest-born Georg Solti, once a student of Bartok's, whips the London Symphony Orchestra into such a frenzy that the music has the power of a thunderbolt and the illumination of lightning.

RICHARD STRAUSS: SYMPHONIA DOMESTICA (Columbia). Strauss once declared that he found himself as interesting as Napoleon and equally worthy to be the subject of a symphony. He generously included his wife and baby in the scenario when he wrote this tone poem about a day at home. The baby is put to bed as the clock chimes 7 and there is some love music for the happy parents that one imaginative critic has found pornographic. The musical themes are not the most memorable that Strauss ever wrote, but the orchestration is magnificent; and George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra make the piece glow with color.

SCHUBERT: SYMPHONY NO. 9 (Deutsche Grammophon). Robert Schumann called it the "symphony of heavenly length," and Karl Boehm and the Berlin Philharmonic just let it flow. There is no feeling of thrust; the rhythmic divisions are as natural as breathing, and Schubert's last and greatest symphony emerges clear, bright and grandly melodious.

HANDEL: THE TWELVE CONCERTI GROSSI, OPUS 6 (4 LPs; Angel). Using the same basic means-- two violins and a cello set against a small orchestra-- Handel achieved widely different moods. Yehudi Menuhin plays one of the violins in the trio and conducts the Bath Festival Orchestra with the same scholarly fidelity and high musical spirits that he displayed in his recent recording of the Water Music.

Every detail is luxuriously provided for; for example, Virtuoso George Malcolm plays the relatively minor but fundamental role of harpsichord accompanist in four of the concertos.

BRITTEN: YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA (London) usually has a commentator to introduce the woodwinds, brass, strings and percussion. This performance without words, conducted by the composer, shows that the piece, with its inventive variations on a theme of Purcell's, is more than just a stunt. The virtuosos of the London Symphony Orchestra make the most of their uninterrupted chance to show off. For those who want a spoken explanation, there is also a new version by the Boston Pops, with Hugh Downs emceeing the instruments (RCA Victor).

CINEMA

MY FAIR LADY. Audrey Hepburn seems delightfully right as the cockney flower peddler transformed into a lady by Professor Rex Harrison, and the happy news is that this lush, eye-filling adaptation of the Lerner-Loewe musical delivers a round $17 million worth of elegant escapism.

TOPKAPI. Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov make larceny laughable in Director Jules Dassin's cheerfully amoral comedy about a jewel caper in Istanbul.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES. This powerfully filmed allegory from Japan translates the search for self into a vivid metaphor about a man and a woman endlessly digging to survive in a sandy hellhole.

THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY. An affable Irish phony (Robert Shaw) who can't face the truth about himself loses his wife (Mary Ure), who cannot live with a lie.

MARY POPPINS. Amidst a whirl of sticky-sweet Walt Disneyism, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke transform a modern juvenile classic into jolly good fun.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. Youthful indiscretions set off a sunny Sicilian nightmare in this savage tragicomedy by Italian Director Pietro Germi (Divorce-- Italian Style).

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. In an often hilarious comedy, John, Paul, George and Ringo demonstrate that Beatlemania, taken as they take it--with a grain of salt--can be quite a tolerable affliction.

GIRL WITH GREEN EYES. Britain's Rita Tushingham, shrewdly guided by Director Desmond Davis, brings warmth, wit and wonderful variety to this portrait of an Irish colleen who falls in love with a man more than twice her age.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. At a sunny resort for shady people, Ava Gardner, Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr reach the ends of their ropes while untangling some of Tennessee Williams' best lines.

BOOKS

Best Reading

COLD FRIDAY, by Whittaker Chambers Looking back on his earnest years at Columbia, his falling out with the Communist party and with the ideologies that shaped his life, Chambers shows warmth and detachment missing from Witness. In particular, the intellectual zeal of the thirties, which demanded that an idea become conviction and that conviction turn into action, comes alive through Chambers' reconsideration of his motives and acts.

SHADOW AND ACT, by Ralph Ellison.

The author of The Invisible Man turns his attention to the situation of the Negro in America, but is wise enough to reject easy solutions or histrionic demands.

OF POETRY AND POWER, edited by Edwin Glikes and Paul Schaber. A collection of poems written about the death of President Kennedy. The contributors and their feelings range from religious poetry through existential stoicism to beat anger.

MARKINGS, by Dag Hammarskjoeld. The late U.N. diplomat kept constant counsel with himself throughout his demanding life by recording the outlines of his mind and soul in these journals. It is an astonishing and often eloquent testament of a God-obsessed Christian who measured his actions against his creed.

FOR THE UNION DEAD, by Robert Lowell. These very personal poems reflect Lowell's old preoccupation-madness, genius, love-but the despair of his anguished early work has been replaced by a balance that adds a new dimension to Lowell's already considerable powers.

THE BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW, by John Cheever. In these short stories, the author keeps a strangle hold on his own creatures of exurbia: the proletariat of vice presidents, the charming, irrelevant aristocracy and the winning eccentrics who compose swimming-pool society.

HERZOG, by Saul Bellow. A complex, demanding novel about divorce, a custody case, and a gentle man's slow recovery from the brutalization of both.

Bellow's writing is consistently brilliant, but his extended reveries slow the pace and keep it from being a unified work.

THE WORDS, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Always a brilliant but negative thinker, Sartre has focused his critical power on himself as a child, and dislikes what he sees. From this graceful, simple memoir, the cast of a powerful, angry mind that was to reject all symbols of tradition, from God to the Nobel Prize, can easily be traced.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week) 2. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (3) 3. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (2) 4. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (4) 5. This Rough Magic, Stewart (5) 6. Julian, Vidal (6) 7. Armageddon, Uris (7) 8. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (9) 9. The Man, Wallace (8) 10. The Lost City, Gunther (10)

NONFICTION

1. Reminiscences, MacArthur (1)

2. My Autobiography, Chaplin (2)

3. The Italians, Barzini (3)

4. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (4)

5. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (5)

6. The Warren Commission Report (8)

7. The Invisible Government, Wise and Ross

8. Markings, Hammarskjold

9. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway (7)

10. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage (9)

* All Times E.S.T.

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