SO much for loyalty among politicians - our TDs and senators think Jeffrey Archer the most overrated author who ever lived.
That's just one of the fascinating findings in a survey of both houses of the Oireachtas conducted by Hodges Figgis, whose managing director, Walter Pohli, declares: "We were interested to find out what our politicians are reading and were staggered by the huge diversity of responses. Our politicians have a really broad, cosmopolitan taste in books."
Indeed, they do. Jung Chang's Wild Swans emerged as the "best-ever book", Gabriel Garcia Marquez was deemed the best living author, The Boss by Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh was the "best-ever political book", while the children's classic looked back on with most nostalgia was Enid Blyton's The Famous Five - no doubt the Gang of 22 took their cue from that.
Sadly, the survey is unwilling to state which TDs and senators voted for which book, but I fancy it was some of our lustier MEPs who favoured Joseph O'Connor's The Irish Male at Home and Abroad, Jim Kemmy who especially liked fellow-Limerickman Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and a few luminaries too obvious to mention who opted for Gitta Sereny's Albert Speer: His Struggle with Truth. The Life of St Bernard isn't mentioned by anyone, though.
Of categories of books favoured by our political representatives, literary fiction scored most highly, followed closely by biography and history. Poetry, alas, along with cookery, romance and business, is of no interest to them.
Nor, apparently, is sex. Asked how they like to relax when not reading, 50 per cent declared their love of music, other. passions being eating out, the cinema, sport, gardening, and painting and decorating. But there were no votes for hanky panky possibly because there are no votes in it, as the Tories have found out.
TRADITIONALLY, book functions fade away in the weeks coming up to Christmas, but not this year.
The most notable of these was Hugh Leonard's presentation to the National Library of his papers and archive. As the manuscripts and letters of most of our famous writers reside in the vaults of American and British universities, this was a very generous donation, though the author's friendship with National Library director Patricia Donlon was undoubtedly a factor in keeping the papers at home.
At this crowded event, I had a lively conversation with New York-born Mark Grantham, the man who invented The Kennedys of Castleross all those years ago. He arrived with a black plastic bag containing his four-decade correspondence with Hugh Leonard, which he gave to the Library as a supplement to the main archive.
THE Lilliput Press had two parties this week. One, in the Temple Hotel, was to celebrate the publication of My Generation, in which 71 prominent writers, musicians, artists and others discuss the formative influence of rock music on their lives.
Many of these essays take the form of personal Top Ten Album citations, and it's interesting to note how often Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones recur - a particular generation is being defined here, a generation, that scoffs when it hears Oasis being deemed "the new Beatles
It's an excellent book for dipping into, and I immediately sought out the choices of Roddy Doyle, Marianne Faithfull, Martin Gale, Dermot Healy and Pat McCabe (does he really think that Cosmo's Factory is the best Creedence Clearwater album? What about Willie and the Poor Boys? Yes, it's that kind of a book).
However, the essay that intrigues me the most is by Paddy Moloney. Taking his cue from Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, whose eight selections on a famous Desert Island Discs programmed were all sung by herself, he picks five albums on which he's played as worthy of inclusion in a top ten. And why not?
A couple of nights later, in Lilliput's Arbour Hill offices, Benedict Kiely was being celebrated. The occasion was the launch of And As I Rode by Granard Moat, described by the publisher as a "ramble around Ireland through song and verse".
There's no better man than Ben to take the reader on such a tour, and the book is a delight, full of unfamiliar poems and ballads from all over Ireland, linked by the compiler's scholarly and affectionate observations.
UP in O'Donoghue's of Merrion Row, INNTI was celebrating its fifteenth (and very handsome) edition. The magazine, which is devoted to poetry in the Irish language, began life twenty-six years ago as a broadsheet in University College, Cork, and was revived in its present shape by co-founder Michael Davitt in 1980.
Almost all of the poets whose careers it has helped to nurture were at the packed O'Donoghue's launch, including Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Gabriel Rosenstock, Liam O Muirthile, Cathal O Searchaigh and, of course, Michael himself, who is pleased that poetry in Irish is no longer just seen as part of some worthy cultural agenda but is regarded on its own merits.
Declan Kiberd launched the new edition in typically eloquent and provocative style, arguing that "there must be a tension between the language of poetry and the language of speech". Among the attendance were veteran broadcaster Harry Thuillier (whose son, Harry Jnr, took the photographs in INNTI 15, legendary Clare hurler Jimmy Smith and publisher Padraig O Snodaigh.
The latter, I was informed by distributor Diarmuid O Cathasadaigh, was responsible, through his Coisceim imprint, for an extraordinary forty-two of the more than 100 Irish-language books published in the last twelve months. The latest of these, a poetry collection by Louis de Paor, was also launched at the reception.