The London Times called it "the cheekiest of parliamentary guides," but a few members of Britain's House of Commons have been less complimentary about The M.P. 's Chart. The 83-page booklet is a collection of irreverent thumbnail descriptions of British politicians written by Manchester Evening News Correspondent Andrew Roth. In Roth's updated pocket guide, Andrew Faulds, a Labor M.P. and former actor, is dismissed as "tall, bearded, rude, sextrovert." Conservative Leader Margaret Thatcher rates a more splendid oxymoron: "blonde, stainless-steel Dresden china." Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe is characterized as a "middlebrow, U.S.-style show-biz politician." Because almost a quarter of the 635 seats in the Commons changed during last year's two elections, Roth's directory has grown increasingly useful to Parliament watchers. His only concession to propriety, however, has been to adjust his use of the King's English to avoid misunderstanding: "gay" politicians have been redescribed as "genial" or "jovial."
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"I can't imagine my life changing. The things I am interested in are things that money can't buy," said Julie Roy, 36, a department-store clerk who had just been awarded $350,000 by a Manhattan court. For nine days Roy was in a courtroom face-off with Psychiatrist and Cosmopolitan Columnist Renatus Hartogs, 66, who, she claimed, had mixed professional advice with sexual advances (TIME, March 24). Sexual intercourse with the good doctor, claimed Roy, had only produced severe depression and two involuntary stretches in a New York psychiatric ward. Last week a six-member jury awarded the $65-a-week clerk $250,000 in compensatory damages and another $100,000 in punitive damages. Hartogs, meanwhile, was left to ponder the possible loss of his medical license and the prospect of a similar suit by another of his former patients.
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"Seventy is wormwood/ Seventy is gall/ But it's better to be 70/ Than not alive at all." It is also better to be 71, which is Poet Phyllis McGinley's real age despite the birthday doggerel she composed for herself last week. "It couldn't matter less," she laughed, "now that it's out." Still a vigorous defender of the glories of housewifery, the 1961 Pulitzer prizewinner had little praise for modern poets. "They stopped using rhyme, and they stopped using meter," she complained. "They're just kind of wandering about, like Erica Jong." Slowed down recently by a stroke and pneumonia, McGinley has all but given up writing her own agile light verse. She spends her time in her Manhattan apartment reading and watching her favorite TV shows, M*A*S*H and The Streets of San Francisco. "I don't like any of the good programs. I like mush," she confessed. "I am the great common denominator."
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