The BEST remark I've heard about The Modern Library: the 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 was attributed to an anonymous young man by the book's co-editor, Carmen Callil: "I've only read two of the books but I've seen 24 of the movies."
Callil made this nicely telling comment on our culture on Today with Pat Kenny (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). However, the best efforts of herself, her editing partner, Colm Toibin - and even the popularising tendencies of Kenny himself - could not bring me any closer to understanding the point of their literary exercise.
In fact, after 20 minutes of them being interviewed I still had no idea what's actually in the book. I won't blame Kenny for that: I've since read 1,000 words or more from Toib in on the subject in last Saturday's Weekend supplement and I still haven't a clue.
Nonetheless, for people who'd just completed a project of such monumental arrogance (a gig's a gig, right?) they'd a lovely, unexclusive way of talking about literature. If Toib in, in particular, can spawn more readers as happy as himself, then perhaps there is a point after all.
A bizarre, reduced-scale model of Washington DC's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is doing the rounds of Ireland at the moment. And anyone in doubt about the highly selective view of that war the monument perpetuates should have heard the tour's travelling historian, an American journalist, in studio on Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday).
In the US, his views would be uncontroversial, bordering on liberal, but that's no excuse for helping the amnesia to spread. In essence, the view sees the war - a US intervention in a civil dispute, it seems - as America's tragedy because US leaders were caught lying to their people; the US couldn't win because the fanatical communist and nationalist enemy would have absorbed any number of deaths (he mentioned a million Vietnamese "men" killed; no word of women and children). Along the way, there was no "carpet bombing", just "tactical" and "strategic" bombing; Vietnam couldn't be "bombed into the Stone Age" anyway, since it was already there.
This was, in other words, a measured ideological apologia, if not for the war itself, at least for the continuing myth of American innocence. It came, of course, in the guise of journalistic objectivity - a guise thoroughly believed-in by its wearer. The influence of such short-sighted historiography of south-east Asia was also audible on an otherwise excellent Worlds Apart (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). In a discussion of the social problems of Cambodia today, the country's trauma was dated to 1975 and the arrival of the Pol Pot regime. The US, and its contribution to that nation's Stone Ageing, did not merit a mention.
A more convincing evocation of American innocence was heard on Another Time, Another Space (RTE Radio 1, Monday). Richard Beirne's programme contained the "music and musings" of one Loraine Johnson, a US-accented poet and composer accidentally encountered at her Killiney, Co Dublin, home. Lorraine loves a starry night. "As you look up you wonder - well, I myself am pretty convinced - that we aren't alone, that there are other people looking down at us, or life forms looking down and wondering - wondering about us. And hopefully when they look down on me they don't feel alone and they take comfort in the fact, as I do. You're sharing a moment together, if you will, and they're looking down and you're looking up at them and you're sort of caught in time, and you lose really all concept of time and space."
Yikes. But while Loraine may be a spacecadet, a tape of this programme, popped into the car's cassette-deck, turned my two highly-strung daughters into a pair of angels, musing with her about sea, stars and aliens - the nicest school-run imaginable. She writes children's poetry, apparently, and I might just invest in a volume.
I could have done with the same Loraine on Wednesday evening, when a prolonged children's bedtime ritual kept me from the telly for the first half of Juventus v Manchester United. But fear not: thanks to the magic of transistorisation (and a fatherly commitment to distractions) I followed most of the action via an earphone - on not one but two British stations.
A fortnight earlier, the Old Trafford leg of the Champions Cup semi-final had been audible only on commercial station Talk Radio, which is gradually doing a Murdoch on radio rights to major sporting events. (Indeed, some of you old Irish Times types are in for a shock later this year when England's cricket test series in South Africa will be absent from BBC Radio 4, the rights snatched up by the Talk Radio upstarts.)
Thus far, the station's approach to soccer under chief executive (and former Sun editor) Kelvin McKenzie seems to have served BSkyB's interests mainly by being terrible - leading listeners to abandon the notion that you can enjoy a match on radio and thus boosting subscriptions to Sky Sports.
However, no one had an "exclusive" for Wednesday's Turin game, and Talk Radio went head-to-head with BBC Radio 5 Live. TR's strategy: make it sound like TV, complete with Sky's Andy Gray and old soldier Alan Parry - whose sell-by date could be gauged by his conviction that Kiev is in "the Soviet Union". (Which is marginally more sensible that Network 2 TV's repeated graphic on Wednesday stating that Bayern Munich's home game was being played in the same Kiev, which is obviously sitting on a wrinkle in the space-time continuum.)
Anyway, TR followed Sky's lead in absurdly magnifying the background crowd noise, so that Gray and Parry had to shout excitedly to be heard, all the time. Sometimes this had a certain rightness, as when Dwight Yorke scored United's equaliser: "This is FANTASY FOOTBALL Alan!!!" Gray screamed. Meanwhile over on 5 Live Mark Lawrenson was quietly enthusing: "That was such a cleverly made goal, Mike." Still, our Lawro went on to describe the action far better than Gray did. The main background noise on 5 Live? You guessed it: Andy Gray roaring in a neighbouring seat. The Beeb's would-be specialist in sarcasm, Northerner Alan Green, couldn't resist an obscurely cutting remark or two. Wonder if this warfare got a bit more direct off-air.