BRITISH Cartoonist Ronald Searle, who drew this week's summit cover (his first for TIME), is recognized as one of the best of Great Britain's talented covey of cartoonists. Searle won a national reputation before he was 30 for his madcap cartoons of "St. Trinian's Girls' School," whose bloomered, black-stockinged, altogether fiendish young ladies roasted oxen in their rooms, made dissenters walk the plank, fired machine guns down the halls ("Girls! Girls! A little less noise please"). He spread his humor through weekly features for Punch and London's News Chronicle, including a cartoon-strip parody on Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, and illustrations for books and magazines. Now, at 40, Searle is developing his more serious side (he conveniently blew up St. Trinian's with an A-bomb). He prefers to be "something of a roving reporter," recently completed a distinguished book on Europe's refugee camps. As for the Big Four at the summit, he painted each conferee as he saw the man's position, and "put that incredible public-relations man Khrushchev in front."

To report this week's cover story, TIME called on key men in five bureaus. After ferreting out and assessing the issues at the approach to the summit, they moved on to Paris to watch every maneuver and countermaneuver. White House Correspondent Charles Mohr followed President Eisenhower in from Washington; London Bureau Chief Robert Manning was on hand when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan arrived; Moscow Bureau Chief Edmund Stevens came to concentrate on Khrushchev, Bonn Bureau Chief John Mecklin to watch the German side of the story. Paris Bureau Chief Frank White not only followed the French position but also coordinated the whole operation. From their well prepared positions, they were all set to report in depth to TIME'S editors in New York on the sudden explosion at the summit.

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