LAST week's TIME carried the -- last stories written by one of our most accomplished writers, Bruce Barton Jr., who died suddenly on the weekend at the age of 41. A son of a co-founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, the advertising agency, Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1943, was a deck officer on a destroyer escort in the Pacific in World War II, came to TIME out of the Navy. He wrote a distinguished Education section for nine years, then moved to Foreign News, and some three years ago took over the Art section. Among his 14 cover stories were two perceptive pieces on the intellectual in America (Thornton Wilder, Jan. 12, 1953; Jacques Barzun, June 11, 1956), a fascinating report on his alma mater (Nathan Pusey, March 1, 1954), and a sensitive essay on a brilliant architect (Le Corbusier, May 5, 1961).

Bruce was one of the few writers around TIME who never took off his coat. He had a wonderful wry wit, but some of his best lines will never be known; he murmured them so quietly that nobody heard.

While he approached art as a writer, not as an expert, he marshaled an impressive array of abilities. He had good taste, an educated sensibility, an unusual breadth and warmth of appreciation, a scrupulous fairness. Recalling some of his critiques, his colleagues chose as one of their favorites a passage from a story on Painter John Chumley's work: "A painting of three children's swings, hanging empty from a leafless tree, is filled with yesterday's laughter. And the open window of an abandoned house fills one canvas with mystery, like a mouth that has much to tell but cannot speak."

ALMOST every TIME story draws deeply on background material, and this week's cover story on British Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson is a special example. London Political Correspondent Honor Balfour has known Wilson since both were students at Oxford, where she was president of the Liberal Club while he was a member. She recalled that "he would scurry along The Broad to committee meetings, gown ballooning in the wind, usually with an armful of books, a cheery little chap with a round, cherubic face like a pink scrubbed cherry stone and a little forelock of short-cropped hair curling briefly onto his forehead."

Through the years, Correspondent Balfour has reported on every phase of Wilson's career as he switched from Liberal to Labor and rose to party leadership. Her detailed knowledge of the general British political situation, gained in 20 years of reporting, gave extraordinary depth to her report for the cover story. Using her report, as well as files from the whole London staff, Associate Editor Michael Demarest, who got his education in England (Rugby, Oxford) and spent more than three years as a correspondent in the London Bureau, wrote a definitive study of the British political situation and the man who may be the next Prime Minister.*

* Shown on the cover before a background of the Labor Party's modernized symbol.

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