'TIME Correspondent Thomas Dozier and Yakov Malik, Soviet delegate to the United Nations, occupied adjoining chairs recently in London's Savoy Hotel barber shop. Part way through their joint shearing Dozier heard Comrade Malik summon a page boy, to whom he gave half a crown and instructions to get him a copy of TIME. When the boy -returned with a copy, Malik took it, looked at the cover and gruffed: "This is not it; this is last week's issue; I've read that one. Don't they have a new TIME up there?"

The top Soviet U.N. delegate's devotion to TIME was interesting news to me. It prompted me to look through a batch of recent cables from our news bureaus and correspondents overseas. Here are some excerpts from them, giving more news about TIME readers and attitudes toward TIME abroad:

Italy's chief-of-state, Luigi Einaudi, according to Rome Bureau Chief George Jones, has taken to reading TIME during his morning bath. His explanation: "It's just the convenient size, and you can go on reading even if it gets wet."

Guglielmo Emanuel, editor-in-chief of Milan's Corriere Delia Sera, Italy's most influential newspaper, has managed to fill the wartime gap in his file of TIME, to which he has subscribed from our first year of publication. A back-of-the-book fan, he told Jones: "No other magazine- popularizes medicine, science, etc. in the same way--easy to read, but not superficial."

Correspondent Jones also reported a conversation he overheard at a recent social gathering. An American living in Rome was giving another middle-aged American matron her opinion of the "disgraceful" way TIME had written about one of her favorite foreign politicians. "I think TIME ought to be barred," she said. "I wouldn't know about that," her friend replied. "I just don't bother to read TIME." "Well," said the first lady, "if you read it every week like I do, you'd be as mad as I am!"

London reports that during an interview England's Queen Elizabeth set one of our correspondents back on his heels with a detailed discussion of TIME'S style and content. Another correspondent, who had been seeing Winston Churchill about the third volume of his Second World War, now appearing serially in LIFE and the New York Times, said that Churchill reports that he runs through TIME immediately on receiving it. Correspondent Cranston Jones passed along the following complaint from his doctor: "So many of my patients read the Medicine section of TIME that I have to read the blasted magazine just to know what they're talking about."

A few weeks ago the deputy chief of Western Germany's Communists denounced TIME to Frankfurt Correspondent Chief David Richardson as "the most vulgar, Red-baiting publication I know." "Vulgar or not," Richardson cabled, "we can call Communist headquarters and make an appointment to see any of the leaders at any time."

Western Zone German newspapers translate and reprint TIME stories almost every week. The editors are usually very conscientious about giving TIME credit for each reprint. Not long ago, however, the Frankfurt Abend-post front-paged our story on German war brides in America, attributing it to "Our Own Correspondent" in New York. Richardson phoned the editor to ask why he had called TIME his own correspondent in the U.S. "Can you name a better one?" asked the editor. Said Richardson: "That one stopped me."

Richardson said that the Berlitz schools in Germany are now using TIME in their courses, and that an English instructor told him: "We find it the very best means of acquainting our students with the American idiom." That idiom, however, is often baffling. Says Richardson: Even our German employees find many phrases in TIME puzzling and come to us to have them translated. Some questions : "What does this expression 'get cracking' mean?" "What is a Toni?" "What are daisy hams?" "Why do you say 'cool' cash?" "What kind of man is a square?"

Sample answers usually begin, "Well, you see -- in the United States ..."

Cordially,

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