January 4, 1981

An old Navy man as well as a veteran of negotiations to free the 52 Americans in Iran, Deputy Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher voiced hope last week that ''this tragic event (which) happened on our watch'' could be brought ''to a successful conclusion on our watch.'' With only 16 days to go before the change of command, Carter Administration officials admitted that the chance of timely resolution was slim. But a narrowing of differences was perceptible through the mist of ambiguity and animosity that has characterized Teheran's responses to Administration proposals.

NUNS AND SOLDIERS By Iris Murdoch. 505 pp. New York: The Viking Press. $14.95. IRIS MURDOCH'S new novel, ''Nuns and Soldiers,'' is an epitome and sum of its 19 predecessors. It provides us, therefore, with an opportunity to formulate some constants among this round score of fictions and to see what they add up to. The first of her novels, ''Under the Net'' (1954), won her immediate acclaim as one of the Angry Young Men - a confusion of sexes that anticipates a number of her characters. Since then, critics, as usual, have disagreed about what is good and what bad in her work. But they have agreed above all else to take Iris Murdoch seriously, to take her as among ''the most accomplished British novelists to come to maturity since the close of World War II,'' to quote one of her critics.

''Of all the Washington acronyms, OSHA is the worst four-letter swear word in small business's vocabulary.'' - Mike McKevitt, director of Federal legislation for the National Federation of Independent Business. ''No thoughtful academic would deny that we could achieve our present environmental objectives at half the price.''- Bruce A. Ackerman, professor of law at Yale University, describing the E.P.A. By EDWIN McDOWELL T HE Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, designed to make the workplace and the environment better places in which to live, have just turned 10. But any celebration will be short-lived if the business community and a growing number of academic critics have their way in the incoming Reagan administration, whose officials and theoreticians are themselves highly critical of both agencies as not only unnecessarily costly but as conceptually flawed as well. Indeed, there is every indication that 1981 will mark a major turning point for both OSHA and the E.P.A., which if they survive the plans Congress apparently has in store for them may do so in greatly altered form.

Citicorp has bought land and commissioned plans for a new office tower on 53d Street and Lexington Avenue, just south of the Citicorp Center, which it built four years ago, and cater-corner to the rear of the bank's headquarters at 399 Park Avenue. The proposals for a building in the city's most active area of new construction comes at a time when office rents in Manhattan are at a record high and the city is re-examining its midtown zoning. Citicorp has commissioned three architectural firms to develop plans for the building, which it would only partly occupy itself. The building would have a million square feet of office space, about the same amount as the slant-roofed Citicorp Center.

Jane Ann Cohen, a former account coordinator with Ted Bates & Company, used to walk past 1166 Avenue of the Americas on her way to work from her East Side apartment. But when the streets were wet or icy, she changed her route to avoid that sidewalk. "I find it slick and if there's ice, forget it - it just doesn't grip," she said. Israel Iveson, a 75-year old part-time messenger, walked in front of 1 Times Square while on the job last winter. It had snowed that morning and the terazzo sidewalk was icy and slippery. Mr. Iveson fell and fractured his hip. His lawyer has filed a claim against the city for a million dollars, charging that Mr. Iveson was disabled for life. In a pending case, Mohamed Ahmed, an accounting clerk, seeks $2 million in damages for injuries that he says resulted from a fall in 1974, when he was 52, on a terrazzo sidewalk outside 522 Fifth Avenue on a rainy day. Mr. Ahmed says he was permanently disabled, with a loss of sight in one eye and the use of an arm seriously impaired. Both the property owner - then the First National City Bank - and the city were sued for $2 million on the claim that terrazzo is dangerous when wet and needs to be covered, at the very least, by a rubber mat. According to lawyers in negligence suits, such cases are on the rise as a result of the wider use of a variety of materials for sidewalks to obtain a more esthetic effect than concrete provides.