For his "secretary" and inspiration since parting with Wife Maria in 1957. Italy's Nobel Prizewinning Poet Salvatore Quasimodo (TIME. Dec. 21) has had tall, blonde, sad-eyed Liliana Fiandra, 24, who proved her devotion to Leftist Quasimodo last year when at her own expense she rushed to Moscow to be at his bedside after he had a mild heart attack. But when Quasimodo, 58, took Liliana to Stockholm with him earlier this month for the Nobel ceremonies, Maria, 44, apparently viewed it as the last straw. Last week, taking a short recess from her dancing school, she was threatening a legal separation (Italy doesn't go in much for divorce).

A man who knows the Atlantic almost as well as his own washbowl. Grandpa Max Conrad, 57, who has crossed that ocean 56 times on solo flights in light aircraft, set down at Washington's Army and Navy Club to get a yard-high, gold-plated trophy honoring two recent record long-distance hops. To a bug-eyed audience he told an eye-bugging tale of a slight mishap on his nonstop flight from Casablanca to Los Angeles (7,688.48 mi.) last June, when he spent a sleepless 58 hr. 38 min. in the cockpit of a single-engined Piper Comanche. Just before taking off from Morocco, Pilot Conrad stuffed his navigational charts in a brown envelope, a clutch of unpaid bills in another. He handed what he believed to be the bills to a well-wishing U.S. consular official, then flew off crosswind, with a one-ton overload of fuel, into the blue yonder, westbound for Trinidad as his first landfall. Casually opening his remaining envelope, he made a discomfiting discovery: he had mistakenly left his charts behind, had a choice of burning up his excess fuel and returning to Africa or of navigating with his unpaid bills. Little daunted, Conrad headed on westward, a 3,700-mile leg of the flight over a very lonely stretch of water, where there is only fragmentary weather information, no radio-navigation aids. It was a grim, dead-reckoning proposition at best. All he had to go by was his compass and a bare outline map of the world. Said casual Max Conrad last week: "I navigated by guess and by prayer, mostly. I'd take out my rosary and say my prayers about once an hour. I made it all right. You know, navigation isn't really so difficult. But you've got to have faith.''

To celebrate her 20-year climb from a Newark church choir to the prestige-drenched Empire Room of Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, organ-toned Songstress Sarah Vaughan rushed out and bought a $60,000 house in suburban New Jersey. One feature: a set of entrance chimes (cost: $450) that plays one of Sarah's biggest hits, How High the Moon. Exulted she: "I used to eat for a year on the price of what it now costs to ring my silly old doorbell."

On a bleak, rainy day last week the Duke of Windsor went to Windsor Castle in the company of Lord Kinross, who is helping him research a book on the styles he set as Prince of Wales. It was 23 years since Windsor broadcast his historic "the-woman-I-love" abdication announcement from the castle. Only an hour before his arrival, his niece, Queen Elizabeth II, had left the castle to join Prince Philip at a shooting party. The duke rummaged through some long-stored furniture, moved on to the castle's library to leaf through some source material for the book. After several hours, he and Kinross emerged from a rear door, just as Elizabeth and Philip were returning through the sovereigns' entrance. Later in the week the Queen and Prince Charles, 11, were photographed as they rode off from Buckingham Palace--a slight infraction of the general rule that lensmen observe in averting cameras from Elizabeth when she is pregnant.

Wisconsin's wily Republican Senator Alexander Wiley, 75, proved himself a keen, if opinionated, political observer. He ticked off a few White House hunters in what he called a "jocular" bipartisan analysis, picked no winner. Of Richard Nixon: "As Vice President, he has done a crackerjack job. However, his over-earnestness may ultimately prove a handicap, for folks like a man who can 'laugh from the belly.'" Of Nelson Rockefeller: "Loaded with vote-getting as well as executive ability. As required, he can make important decisions--as well as eat pizza pie or kiss babies with the best of them. Unless he gets in high gear soon, however, he may find that the party's nomination will end up in somebody else's pocket." Of Adlai Stevenson: "His interstellar concepts dressed up in high-falutin language . . . are not expected to persuade the majority of people to take this man too seriously." Of John F. Kennedy: "As a 'profile in campaign courage,' [he] may possibly find the right words on some of the significant issues, but it appears that they lack the significant punch to land him in the White House." Of Hubert H. Humphrey: "Talkative Hubert may find that his loquaciousness proves to be a hindrance. By and large, the home folks figure a man's got to stop sometime to think of what to say next." Of Lyndon B. Johnson: "The rawhide with which he cracks straying mavericks in the Senate--effective though it may be --is not long enough to corral the votes in '60." Of Stuart Symington: "Stu's posture of a master critic of the U.S. defense space program has not demonstrated the rocket thrust necessary to catapult him into the White House."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.