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"It is like taking part in a piece of history,'' said William Urry, archivist to the Dean and Chapter Library at Canterbury, presenting one of the least convincing arguments on taxation since the days when square-riggers carried marked-up tea to Boston. Noting that the Canterbury city council makes an annual grant to the almshouses in the nearby village of Harbledown, Archivist Urry wondered why. The city treasurer hadn't the foggiest. So Urry peered down through history, found the grant's origin nearly 800 years deep. In 1170, his dreams darkened by the blood of Archbishop Thomas a Beckett, the conscience-stricken Henry II ordered the grant to the almshouses to be made in perpetuity. Hence, chirps Urry, "every time anyone living in the city of Canterbury pays his or her rates, he or she is contributing toward the penance made by Henry II" for murder in the cathedral.
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The maleficent diamond that has legendarily brought sinister fate to its owners for 300 years last week became the property of everyone in the U.S. By registered mail (postage: 90¢; registry charge: $151.85), the Hope Diamond went from Manhattan to the new Hall of Gems and Minerals in Washington's Smithsonian Institution. Donor: Harry Winston, the jeweler prince, who bought the $1,000,000-$2,000,000, steel blue, 44½-carat purey from the estate of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, famed capital hostess whose first son was killed by an automobile, whose daughter died from an overdose of sleeping pills, whose husband, onetime Washington Post Owner Edward B. McLean, died in a mental institution. Some previous owners: King Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, English Banker Henry Thomas Hope, and Subaya, favorite of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid, who murdered her.
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Working on a new novel called Lord Timothy Dexter Revisited, a guest known as Mr. Maynard kept his identity mostly secret on a ranch in Nevada's Washoe Valley. This week, his residence requirements satisfied, Mr. Maynard will have to make himself known in order to seek a divorce (after a second marriage that has lasted 21 years) as John Phillips Marquand. Meanwhile, the 65-year-old Maynard has found another love: Nevada. It "is the last frontier of the fiction writer. This is the place for a young writer to come. What this place needs is a mute and glorious Milton. If Mark Twain and Bret Harte were alive today, they could do it all over again. If I were 30 years younger . . ."
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In Rome the bongo drums throbbed unnecessarily. Tuxedos dropped to the floor in homage. Blue-blooded Borgheses and warm-blooded entertainers stamped their feet, but hardly to get circulation going. Cinemelon Anita Ekberg had just slumped with exhaustion after dropping a shoulder strap in a loamy cha-cha-cha, and now a Turkish bellydancer was grinding away at Anita's challenge: "Let's see you do better." She did. With fundamental gesture—and no clothing save a pair of black lace panties—Haisch Nanah, 24, turned U.S. Socialite Peter Howard's birthday party for an Italian countess into haischish. Luckily, the poliziotti showed up before the 200 guests could succumb to Roman fever. Said the Vatican's L'Osservatort-Romano next day: "The lice of society."