"Particularly Proud"

To Sir Winston Churchill, skilled fashioner of what he once called that "noble thing," the English sentence, last week went literature's biggest crown, the Nobel Prize for literature. Not only his 27 books were taken into account, said the Swedish Academy, but also the "brilliant oratory in which he stood forward as the defender of eternal human values."

At 10 Downing Street, receiving the Swedish ambassador, Sir Winston was almost blushingly delighted. "It is a literary distinction," he said. "I am particularly proud of that."

He grew reminiscent. "I notice that the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize was Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and that another equally rewarded was Mr. Bernard Shaw... I knew them both quite well, and my thought was much more in accord with Mr. Rudyard Kipling. On the other hand, Mr. Rudyard Kipling never thought much of me, whereas Mr. Bernard Shaw* often expressed himself in the most flattering terms."

Some neutral Swedes were made a little nervous by the award. "Even if Caesar happens to sing," said the Socialist government's newspaper, the Stockholm Mor-gon-Tidningen, "he can never become an Orpheus . . . The academy move paves the way for the statesman, warrior, philosopher and poet, Mao Tse-tung in Peking, to receive the next year's prize." The Liberal Aftonbladet, however, thought the award might "well have been made much earlier." The Communist Ny Dag sneered: "This is a clear case of sidetracking Eisenhower . . . They say he, too, has written a book." But Sir Winston's friends paid him honor. "Historian laureate," said the New York Herald Tribune. "His countrymen can share in his pride," said the Times of London.

-Of Shaw, Sir Winston once wrote: "He was one of my earliest antipathies . . . This bright, nimble, fierce and comprehending being, Jack Frost, dancing bespangled in the sunshine. He is at once an acquisitive capitalist and a sincere Communist."

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