British Novelist Nevil Shute, 59, who moved out to Australia in 1950, was back in London to stimulate sales of a new novel, see old friends, change a few attitudes. Five years ago, In the Wet set him up, after a long career in fiction, as the empire's most promising angry middle-aged man. Jumping 30 years into the future, Shute's 17th novel described a commonwealth of flourishing dominions (where citizens' merits could earn them extra votes) fettered by a mired-in-Socialism United Kingdom that approximates "a home for incurables." A tired, aging Queen Elizabeth II is "in the middle of a first-class constitutional crisis. The job of ruling England has become so unattractive that her children won't take it on." In London last week, the new Shute was full of woolly Australian sheepishness. In the Wet, he explained, was the result of "several astringent years of Socialist rule" and "the sniff of decay in the still bomb-shattered London. I had forgotten the resilience of my own race. Britain sparkles with optimism. London is a city with new buildings brushing shoulders with the old ..." Novelist Shute--an aeronautical engineer whose full name is Nevil Shute Norway--was sparkling with optimism too. The new, noncontroversial The Rainbow and the Rose was wallowing in the wet black ink after a prepublication sale of 100,000 copies.

"No man can make any substantial savings from being President," said Herbert Clark Hoover, noting with approval that Dwight Eisenhower had signed a bill creating an annual $25,000 pension for ex-Presidents. "My situation differs from other, and probably future, former Presidents," explained the 31st U.S. President. "America provided me with an education, including a profession [mining engineer], I practiced that profession in years when there was no income tax or only a small amount. I was able to save a competence.* I have considered that I have a great debt to my country for the opportunities it has given me. Therefore, I have made it a practice to devote all personal compensation derived from our Government to public service or charity." Twanged Fellow Pensioner Harry S. Truman, 33rd President: "No comment."

Guiding such frail missiles as Royal Coachmen and Grey Hackles, NATO's General Lauris Norstad fished a chill, rushing trout stream in the Salzburg Alps, put in a four-day vacation near Hitler's old aerie at Berchtesgaden. From morning golf and afternoon angling he took off just enough time to make a short statement for the American Forces Network on the preparedness of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: "We still have some way to go, but we are now over the hump. Our strength is very real and very significant."

Stopping Paris traffic with her slim figure and undiminished stage presence. Old-time Operatic Soprano Mary Garden concealed all but the younger half of her 81 years. Stirring from retirement in Aberdeen, the Scots prima donna was reportedly in the city on business: to sign a contract for a motion picture and TV series based on her life. Trilled Mary Garden, who refused a similar proposal from Hollywood producers nearly five years ago: "None of those dumb blondes can play me."

Testing anew the strength of his convictions. John David Provoo was cell-bound last week. His old trouble--treason --dated from the World War II surrender of Corregidor, when California-born U.S. Sergeant Provoo bowed deeply to his arriving captors, spoke to them in fluent Japanese, offered his humble services. A toadying informer, he bullied Americans, baked layer cakes for the Japanese, caused the execution of a U.S. captain. But after the war, the case was bungled in U.S. legal machinery, and Provoo's conviction was reversed on technical grounds by the Supreme Court. This time, the rap was no less appealing. Picked up in Lincoln, Neb. after an incident involving an 18-year-old boy, Provoo last week got a three-year sentence for sodomy.

With casual plausibility, a Russian newsman at the U.N. put an effective end to five, years of speculation. What--a curious West had wondered--happened to Vasily Dzhugashvili Stalin, fighter pilot, once (in his mid-20s the youngest general in Russia's armed forces, younger son of Joseph Stalin? He was last seen publicly at his father's funeral in 1953, and a report later that year said he was in a "correction camp" in the Russian Arctic. Other hearsays turned up as time passed: Vasily Stalin was dead in a central Asiatic slave labor camp, alive in a Moscow prison, mentally sick in a sanitarium. "There is no mystery," said Newsman Alexander Kislov at the U.N., at last getting down to Tass facts, "Vasily Stalin went to pieces after his father's death. It was a matter of drinking too much, poor fellow. He had to be sent to an institution. I heard he was still being treated the last time I was in Moscow."

*Webster: "Means sufficient for the necessaries of life; sufficiency without excess."

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