`I don't know whether I was asked to launch this book as a writer who believed in fairies or as a friend of Angela's but I'm very happy to be here," laughed historian Roy Foster, as he prepared to do the honours at the party for Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary in Dublin's Waterstone's on Tuesday night .
Foster, who professed himself a great admirer of Bourke's creative writing, singled out for particular praise the book's role as a "compelling social history of Victorian Ireland" which detailed the "modernising ambience of Tipperary in Victorian times".
He particularly liked the manner in which Bourke sifted the facts which she gleaned from contemporary records through the "compassionate eye of the novelist". As for his own biography of W.B.Yeats, Foster said he's about a third of the way through the second volume. For the dog days of August there was quite a crowd at Tuesday's book launch: see On the Town (Weekend 2) for a run down on who was there.
This Week saw the publication of a new edition of Metre, the poetry journal headed up by poet and critic David Wheatley which has pulled off something of a literary coup. In amongst the new verse and lit. crit. are four previously unpublished poems by the American poet, John Berryman, who died in 1972.
The poems, were "discovered" by Philip Coleman, a young Irish academic who travelled to the University of Minnesota to research the poet for a PhD. "I would be wary of the word `discovered' because it sounds as though I found them on a dusty attic floor," he says rather modestly. "These poems have been seen before by scholars but haven't previously been published"
The poems, which Coleman points out throw an interesting light on Berryman's time in Ireland in 1966, do not fight shy of poking fun at the Irish: "Telegrafa an Phoist. The silly Irish / like the silly Indians, when few understand one language, / want to use two, / multiplying idiocy, rife in both lands, / deserted now by the intelligent English / to their own stupid fates".
Sadbh has been following with interest the correspondence on the Letters Page about why book prices accompanying reviews are frequently given in sterling. The policy on these pages is that Irish published books carry the Irish price and UK publications the sterling one - and occasionally-reviewed American publications are given with the cost in US dollars.
The reason is simple. Due to many variables such as currency fluctuations, the final price of a book published outside the Republic can vary considerably from week to week from one bookshop to another. Quoting, say, the publisher's price as shown on the dust-jacket of a British published book - the only constant in a very variable equation - at least gives potential Irish purchasers a rough estimate of how much a book is going to set them back. Roll on the euro and standard prices throughout Europe.
With all the talk about Tina Brown's Talk magazine centred on the Hillary Clinton interview, the literary content has been rather overlooked. While it's clear that Brown is not trying to create a highbrow bookish journal, there is nonetheless a strong literary theme running through the magazine.
Novelist Martin Amis and historian Simon Schama have both signed multimedia deals with the magazine, which is the centrepiece of a project masterminded by Miramax head Harvey Weinstein. Amis's first piece for the mag is a slaughtering attack on Hannibal author Thomas Harris, while other literary highlights include playwright Tom Stoppard on discovering his Jewish roots, and a conversation about Colette between the writer's biographer, Judith Thurman, and writer Erica Jong.
All those years - three in all - that John Lennon spent at the Liverpool Institute of Art weren't in vain. It turns out he put them to good use when his son Sean was a baby: instead of just reading him stories at night, Lennon got out the paint box and drew for his son.
Now Little Brown have published them under the title Real Love: The Drawings for Sean. In her introduction Yoko Ono explains that, when Sean was born in 1975, Lennon announced: "I'm going to raise this baby, Yoko. You do the business" - and that's the way it went . "John had every one of Sean's drawings framed. We suddenly had many, many framed drawings by Sean adorning the walls of our Dakota apartment."
Whatever the artistic merit of the paintings, the little volume, out next week, will no doubt be scrutinised by Beatle scholars for years to come and certainly form a quaint, unexpected addition to Beatle memorabilia.