Speaking at a literary luncheon at Washington's Statler Hilton Hotel, Felix Frankfurter, oldest justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, warned the guests that most political diaries are scarcely worth the research to blow them to hell. Frankfurter, whose tape-recorded reminiscences were published last year, explained that few diarists deliberately lie, but they are all prey to "the fallibility of the human memory, the infirmities of the human mind, the weakness of human understanding and recollection." And intelligent, articulate diarists are the very worst kind: they couple their love of the language with their imagination and usually produce "a fusion of fact and fancy." To illustrate his point, Frankfurter drew a bead on James K. Polk, a President who was neither articulate nor imaginative but rather, in Frankfurter's view, a "bookkeeper" and "a dull man." Said Frankfurter: "He wrote a reliable diary."

Off to Scotland for a weekend of shooting, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan comfortably reposed knock-kneed on a shooting stick while awaiting the flushing of his quarry. Macmillan, looking the soul of a gentleman hunter, was a guest on the estate of Lord Home, Britain's Foreign Secretary. Thoroughly relaxed by his recreation, he dashed back to Britain's best-known shooting gallery, the House of Commons.

The season opened with a downpour outside London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. As they emerged from separate limousines, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret and Princess Alexandra, opulently gowned, bejeweled and tiara-topped, struck strikingly similar attitudes and expressions before dashing under the marquee in the escort of an umbrella-holding doorman. Several days later, Elizabeth had a far closer call from an overhead peril. Ordinarily, when she flies in her own realm, her air travel is known as a "purple flight," and all aircraft must avoid her route by ten miles. Flying back home from a visit to Denmark, Elizabeth had no such protection as she jetted along near the West German-Dutch border at a 35,000-ft. altitude. The Queen missed the end of her reign by an estimated 50 ft. Angling in on the Queen's R.A.F. Comet, Orion, came two U.S.-made Sabre jet fighters. They closed with the Comet at more than 1,000 m.p.h., whooshed past little more than a jet's-breadth above the airliner. The Queen and Prince Philip were unaware of their close call, but not so one of the copilots, who later growled: "And they had damn great iron crosses beneath their wings." From West Germany's Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss came "deep regrets," a promise to punish the culprits--"if, in fact, German aircraft were involved."

In Dayton's Air Force Museum, the nation's first military pilot, retired Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, 80, took a nostalgic look at the 1909 Wright Flyer, then climbed aboard the open-air, pusher-propellered crate. With him was an old colleague, retired Lieut. General Yoshitoshi Tokugawa, 83, who in 1910 made the first powered-aircraft flight in Japan, where he is renowned as "the grandfather of flight." "This is my ship," said Benny Foulois proudly, perhaps recalling a memorable day--March 2, 1910--when, as an Army lieutenant, he made his first take off, first solo, first landing and, finally, managed to rack up the U.S.'s first crash of a military aircraft.

Arriving in West Berlin for a Crusade for Freedom jamboree, able Economist-Diplomat Eleanor Dulles Blondheim, sister of the late Secretary of State and long one of State's top German specialists, got a bear hug that almost fractured her dignity. She was met by a hidebound impersonator enacting the role of the beleaguered city's bear symbol. Widow Dulles disengaged herself from the affectionate embrace, went on to help West Berlin celebrate the tenth anniversary of the city's U.S.-donated Freedom Bell.

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