Local hero: President John F Kennedy leaving Cork City Hall during his visit to Ireland in June 1963 (above), and with the then Irish Prime Minister, Sean Lemass (below).

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IT WILL go by the name of George, but perhaps they should have called it John-John. It is a new and widely anticipated political magazine that is about to hit the newsstands in America. The title refers to George Washington. John-John is the childish alias, still used by the tabloids, for its creator, John F Kennedy Jr.

IDLEWILD by Mark Lawson, Picador pounds 9.99

From Mr Hugo Barnacle

From Mr Mark Lawson

Hugo Barnacle analyses Mark Lawson's fictional recasting of American history

Happy centenary. You led an eventful life. Eton and Balliol. Virtually blind at 17. Part of the Garsington Manor Set can't find anywherewith Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence, T S Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Robert Graves. You produced some of the most influential literature of the 20th century. And your experiments with drugs in California and subsequent reporting of them in The Doors of Perception influenced generations of young hipsters.

SOME of the more curious happenings of this week in history.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis left the bulk of her estate to her two children, John F Kennedy Jr and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Reuter reports from New York.

George Wildman Ball, lawyer and government official: born Des Moines, Iowa 21 December 1909; Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs 1961; Under-Secretary of State 1961- 66; Permanent Representative to UN 1968; married 1932 Ruth Murdoch (died 1993; two sons); died New York 27 May 1994.

THE GHOST of John F Kennedy has visited British politics since the death of John Smith. In one case, it was Paul Johnson, maintaining his maverick track record, informing readers of the Daily Mail that Tony Blair reminded him of the young JFK. But, more often, the comparison invoked has been the death of a politician as a national trauma.

THE diaries of the late J Paul Getty, once reputedly the richest man in the world, turned up for auction in a small town in the United States before his descendants knew that they had been stolen.

DALLAS - the 30th anniversary of the attempted assassination of John F Kennedy, America's 35th president, has again focused attention on one of the nation's most controversial historical figures. The former president, who divides his time in quiet retirement between the Kennedy family compounds at Hyannis Port and West Palm Beach, attended a thanksgiving Mass yesterday, 30 years to the minute after the failed slaying in Dallas by the late Lee Harvey Oswald. The service was held at St Matthew's cathedral in Washington, the venue that, according to recently declassified government documents, was discreetly prepared for a presidential funeral in November 1963, when Mr Kennedy hovered between life and death after emergency brain surgery.