Katharine Graham

Leadership, by Rudolph W. Giuliani with Ken Kurson, Miramax, 288 pages, $25.95. Sometime in the winter of 2001, back in the days when Rudy Giuliani was the mortal mayor of an immortal city and not vice versa, I was approached to see if I might serve as the writer for a book he was planning to do on his tenure. Aware of how New York had transformed into something spectacular under the Giuliani regime, I was intrigued. It was a fascinating tale, just as Giuliani himself was a fascinating tale, if it was a tale that could be told.

EDGARTOWN, Mass. -- "I've lost count," confessed William Styron, the writer, when asked how many times he and his wife, Rose, had dined with the Clintons during the first two weeks of the president's vacation here.As the Clintons have hopped from party to party around this island, it has seemed as if the same people have been picked up each evening to hop along.By late last week, even President Clinton's aides had started referring to his evening companions as the "usual cast."Besides the Styrons, the serial socializers on Martha's Vineyard have included Vernon Jordan, the Washington lawyer and Clinton confidant; Carly Simon, the singer; Katharine Graham, chairwoman of the Washington Post Co.; Diane Sawyer, the television journalist; and Richard Friedman, the Boston developer who has lent the Clintons his 20-acre estate here.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder Bantam Books / 960 pages / $35 When he was 21 and "people weren't listening," Warren Buffett says, half in jest, he gave his best financial advice. Now he can say "the dumbest things in the world," and investors will bet the farm that he's right. The world's richest man, Buffett has become an American legend. He has lived in the same relatively modest house for 50 years. He has made millions for shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway.

Silence gives the proper grace to women. - Tecmessa, a concubine in Sophocles' Ajax, 440 B.C. TODAY, 26 centuries later, few women seek permission from men to speak in their own voices, let alone worry about doing so gracefully. While corporate women have yet to shatter the glass ceiling, they continue to rap loudly upon it. Equally vociferous are academic women, who have been disproportionately rejected from tenured professorships in many prestigious colleges and universities. Less well-known are the recent efforts of the publishing industry to rectify centuries of the silence about women's lives through the publication of their biographies.

For 37 years of his more than half-century of writing, Bill Burton did what I do now - except he did it better. Still does. That's why on April 23, the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association will induct the former Evening Sun outdoors editor into its Hall of Fame, an elite club of slightly more than 50 members that includes Henry Louis Mencken, Sam Lacy, Katharine Graham and Herb Block. At 82, Burton still writes a column for the Bay Weekly in Annapolis. Publisher and editor Sandra Martin nominated him "many, many, many times, and they never took him," she says, tongue in cheek.

London -- It's Chapter 4,000-and-something of the never-ending serial of Charles and Diana, wherein Princess Di becomes queen of Washington society while London debates whether Prince Charles should become king of Britain.And Charles confesses: "Tart Fondled My Thigh in Colombian Brothel," as the News of the World put it with tasteful elegance yesterday.The News of the World cribbed its headline from the Sunday Times. where the second installment of Jonathan Dimbleby's biography of Charles revealed the prince had three affairs over 20 years with the same woman -- Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles, "the most intimate friendship of his life."

WASHINGTON -- The famous, the near-famous and the never-famous converged on the National Cathedral yesterday to bid adieu to Pamela Harriman, the ambassador to France who built a legend around her political connections and high-powered salons.Part diplomat, part fund-raiser, part aristocrat -- and, some might say, part vixen -- she was remembered yesterday as a patriotic American who had served her country well. In the crowd of 1,157 that gathered for her funeral, the far reach of her charms was boldly in evidence.

When Tina Brown took over the New Yorker 2 1/2 years ago, she did something quite shrewd. Definitely, she was going to turn the place upside down -- but how do you turn upside down a place predicated on tradition without looking like some sort of Chanel-suited vulgarian? You beat the traditionalists at their own game, that's how. Ms. Brown's defense: She was returning the New Yorker to its true tradition, the bounce and flair the magazine knew under its founding editor, Harold Ross.Well, bounce and flair are subjective things, but that hasn't kept Ms. Brown from continuing to present herself as a Rossian revolutionary.

WASHINGTON -- Such a mild winter night in Georgetown, the traffic noisy, smelly and going nowhere, an M Street busker with an electric guitar plugged into a three-dollar amp, bodies five deep at J. Paul's bar. Barry Burns and Marilyn Walker striding up Wisconsin Avenue stop to check the sign on the awning above the cut-rate haberdashery: "Closing Sale -- 50% Off."Mr. Burns looks at the store clerk standing on the sidewalk and eyeing him with all the warmth of a strip-joint bouncer."This place has been closing for the last 16 years," says Mr.Burns, a 47-year-old Post Office worker who lives on Capitol Hill.

A THIRD of America's population was not born or not yet in kindergarten when, 20 years ago today, burglars working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President were arrested breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex in Washington.It's no wonder that the memory of Watergate has grown dim.A survey of high school students in 1986 found that one in three could not place Watergate as an event that happened after 1950 and one in five associated it with the resignation of some president other than Richard Nixon.