In British pubs and parlors, the coming general elections were all but ignored in favor of an even more pressing issue. Little more than a week before the start of the cup matches in Mexico City, Bobby Moore, captain of England's World Cup soccer team, was arrested in Bogota, Colombia, on charges of stealing a $1,400 emerald-studded bracelet. The jeweler filed suit for an extra $11,000 in "moral damages," and police picked up hints that Soccer Superstar Bobby Charlton had been Moore's accomplice. Moore is now free on "conditional liberty," but Charlton's wife Norma is still indignant: "They are a right load of bandits out there."

When Chiang Kai-shek's 80-year-old secretary visited the Ivory Coast, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny asked how a man of his age managed to appear to be fit and 50. It was easy, replied the secretary, for one who practiced the ancient Chinese sport of tai chi chuan, or shadowboxing. Houphouet-Boigny, 64, wasted no time in hiring a Taiwanese master named Kwang to teach him the sport's 108 movements. Kwang claims that his charge has not had a sick day since, and he adds, quickly hiding his spectacles, that the President can read without his glasses now. At least one observer was convinced. President Albert Bongo of nearby Gabon sent for an instructor and is practicing already.

When the horse Purple Star stumbled on a double jump and sent Princess Anne somersaulting to the ground, the air turned blue. "I saw bloody stars," exclaimed the shaken princess at the army horse trials in Tidworth, Wiltshire. Queen Elizabeth probably saw stars over her daughter's second public "bloody" in two months.

Churchill liked to relax with a hot water bottle wrapped in a panda cover. Stalin had thin, sloping shoulders and achieved his robust look with a padded military greatcoat. George Bernard Shaw teased Nancy Astor about her boyish bosom. Such are the recollections in Memories, the just-published autobiography of Biologist-Author Sir Julian Huxley, 76. And how would Sir Julian himself like to be remembered? "Not primarily for my specialized scientific work, but as a generalist; one to whom, enlarging Terence's words, nothing human, and nothing in external nature, was alien."

When a long-haired antiwar demonstrator at the University of Kentucky grabbed A.B. ("Happy") Chandler by the tie, Chandler, 71, countered with his own backlash--a stiff punch in the nose. "I'm sorry I did that," said the former Governor and U.S. Senator. "I didn't even think." The punch won Happy no votes on the campus, where he is a trustee, but it did draw a commendatory letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The idea was to whip up some frontpage glamour for Conservative Party Chief Ted Heath, whose poll ratings are lackluster as England's general election nears. Tory flacks alerted the press that Bachelor Heath and a blonde were embarking for a sail aboard his yacht Morning Cloud. But Ted sniffed "Absolute nonsense" to all notions of romance, asserting that the lady was merely his sea cook and sailing companion. Then he ran the Morning Cloud aground on a sand bar.

Their wedding a year ago in Hohenschwangau was played as a Bavarian fairy tale come true. Now it seems that Princess Anna-Maria Elizabeth, 25, prefers a local innkeeper to her husband, Prince Max Emanuel von Thurn und Taxis, 34. The prince, she said, "couldn't fulfill his marital duties." This was too much for Hohenschwangau's silent majority, who took to the streets with placards to register a vote of confidence in the prince's powers and to offer Maria a choice: love him or leave him. She left him.

How does her father feel about her appearing nude in the San Francisco company of Oh! Calcutta!? Well, said Louise Hatch, 24, the show is a "tongue-in-cheek parade of our sexual hangups"; and after all, "he feels that people who object to the show for moral reasons, ought to object to things like the war in Viet Nam instead." "I am not uptight about it at all," said her father, Episcopal Bishop Robert Hatch of the Diocese of Western Massachusetts. "I am glad she has a chance to express herself."

After the young pitcher showed his stuff by throwing out the first ball for the home opener, Washington Senators Owner Bob Short offered him a job. "Let me think about that one," said the righthander. A few weeks later, David Eisenhower signed a contract (at an undisclosed salary) to serve the Senators as an administrative assistant for the summer. His chief duty: to compile statistics on the players.

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