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

A man who can be calm when there is anything to be calm about, ex-President Harry Truman brushed aside a $1 bill proffered for his autograph, and declaimed: "I just can't sign them any more. And you know why? That damned Attorney General would just love to put me in jail. You can't deface currency--that's the law." Asked if he was joking about Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Truman snorted: "No, he is no good." In Washington, a Treasury official passed the word: the Treasury '"never has held that autographs or minor writing on currency is a violation of the law"; in fact, outgoing Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey has sometimes autographed banknotes himself.

A blue-ribbon geneticist but a nearsighted political red, Britain's peppery J. B. S. Haldane, 64, sees the world darkly, from under a pair of shaggy eyebrows, and propounds his judgments dourly, through a thick, thistly mustache. Long a caustic observer of Britain and of most of the human race (as its successor, he once proposed the rat, "an animal of considerable enterprise, which stands as good a chance as any other of evolving toward intelligence"), Haldane for years (1940-49) was editorial chairman of the London Daily Worker, was undisturbed by such political incidents as the Berlin blockade and the coup in Czechoslovakia, boggled only after the Kremlin offended his sensibilities as a scientist by proclaiming the doctrines of Geneticist Trofim Lysenko as undebatable Communist truth. Last week John Burden Sanderson Haldane carried out an old threat, flew away from Britain headed for neutral ground more congenial to his oddly balanced mind. His last blast, as he took off for India: "I want to live in a free country where there are no foreign troops based all over the place. Yes, I do mean Americans."

The British press, which had dreamed up a romance between Princess Margaret and handsome, horsy Lord Patrick Beresford, dithered madly over a major crisis. Beresford, currently serving as an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, had been ordered to a tour of duty overseas (Cyprus, in October). Concluded London columnists: Lord Patrick was being exiled at palace request. The young nobleman himself obligingly declared that, rather than go to Cyprus, he would resign his commission and become a jockey. Beresford changed his mind next day, and by week's end the monarchy was still secure, Beresford was still headed for Cyprus, and the press had another crisis to gasp about: at a garden party, too much healthy princess brimmed out over Margaret's low-cut gown. Twittered Daily Expressman William Hickey: "Could one or two extra pounds--a few extra dishes of strawberries and cream, a few extra ice creams at parties--have given the gown a look that wasn't intended?"

Taking seriously her duties as the wife of a hard-campaigning politician and presidential dark horse, comely Helen Stevenson Meyner donned fatigues and tagged along when New Jersey's Democratic Governor Robert B. Meyner visited 5,000 National Guardsmen sweating off civilian lard at Camp Drum, N.Y. Climbing into a big M-47 tank, she poked around gingerly, grinned grittily for photographers as she emerged, confessed: "I've always had a suppressed desire to drive a tank through a greenhouse."

Ninety-nine years after his death and 100 years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down-its inflammatory ruling that even in free territory he could not sue for his freedom because as a slave he was not a citizen, Dred Scott will be honored by a granite tombstone on his unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis. The stone's donor: Mrs. Charles Harrison, granddaughter of Taylor Blow, who bought Scott after the decision, then set him free.

Bouncing into Manhattan on the last leg of his 2 1/2-week rubberneck journey through the U.S., during which he acquired a cowboy hat, clambered down into the Grand Canyon, inspected the homes of Hollywood film stars, short, fast-moving Prime Minister Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy of Pakistan got a rube's-eye view of the big city. A high-toned Fifth Avenue store charged him $25 for two neckties, and a sneak thief filched his $250 movie camera from his limousine (the mortified State Department hurriedly bought him another).

Checking the back seat of his cab after delivering a nattily dressed gent to Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel, Hackie Harold Petrie found a package of worn, water-stained banknotes, dutifully took the wad to police, who totted up $11,200 in fifties and hundreds. Reporters tracked down a man who was picked up at the same time, traveled the same route, was delivered to the same destination: Tammany Bossman Carmine De Sapio. Said New York State's Democratic leader, wide-eyed behind his tinted glasses: "You're kidding. How about that?"

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