Good news for those of us who consider Elizabeth Bowen among the finest Irish writers of the century - the Dublin-born novelist and short-story writer, who died twenty-five years ago tomorrow and was buried in the corner of North Cork she always regarded as home, is the subject of a forthcoming major television documentary, while an important new edition of her works is due from one of the main international publishing houses within the next couple of months.
Sean O Mordha, whose films on Yeats, Wilde, Joyce and Beckett have won critical and popular acclaim, has long been an admirer of Bowen - the centenary of whose birth is next year - and for five years has been attempting to make a film about her life and work. He was finally given the go-ahead by the BBC (with RTE as co-producer) and the resulting film is scheduled for screening this May in BBC1's prestigious Bookmark slot.
At the same time Random House's Vintage imprint will be launching the first volumes of a new critical edition of all her works, while a movie of her early novel, The Last September, to be directed by Deborah Warner from a screenplay by John Banville, is currently in pre-production. And an edition of her letters, edited by Hermione Lee, is also in preparation.
If all this seems to parallel the second coming of Edith Wharton (which happened a few years ago, and not before time), it should be remembered that Elizabeth Bowen never suffered the obscurity that was Wharton's fate - indeed, her major fiction has seldom been out of print, and she has long been impressively represented in Penguin.
Of course, undoubtedly there will be people alarmed at this renewed attention to Bowen - people who choose to dismiss her as being not Irish at all or, indeed, who can't get beyond the fact that during the second World War she furnished reports about Irish attitudes to the British Ministry of Information.
As regards the latter charge - that she was, in effect, a spy - Roy Foster's excellent essay "The Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen" (contained in Paddy and Mr Punch) puts that in context, not least in its illuminating use of quotations from her reports to the Ministry.
Here she is, for instance, on Irish neutrality: "It would be more than hardship, it would be sheer disaster for this country, in its present growing stages and with its uncertain morale, to be involved in war . . . I could wish some factions in England showed less anti-Irish feeling . . . The charge of `disloyalty' against the Irish has always, given the plain facts of history, irritated me. I could wish that the English kept history in mind more, that the Irish kept it in mind less."
As for the insistence that her background and class precludes her from being accepted as an Irish writer - well, if one wished to indulge in such xenophobia, the same charge could be levelled against most of the writers in whose reflected glory the people of this country are only too happy to bask.
She herself insisted in a 1942 interview published in The Bell: "I regard myself as an Irish novelist. As long as I can remember I've been extremely conscious of being Irish . . . All my life I've been going backwards and forwards between Ireland and England and the Continent but that has never robbed me of any feeling of my nationality."
Sadly, in this perennially distressful country of ours - "moidered by memories" in Gogarty's phrase - there still seem to be people wishing to deny her that. However, the rest of us can rejoice in these new celebrations of her achievement.
Speaking of Roy Foster, this incomparable scholar will be in Kilkenny's Butler House next Thursday night delivering the last in the series of lectures organised by Proinsias O Drisceoil of the Co. Kilkenny VEC Arts Education Programme. The title of the lecture is "Theme Parks and Stories". and in it Professor Foster will address some of the contemporary controversies surrounding historical interpretation. No better man.
Fred Hanna is obviously chuffed that his Nassau Street bookstore has just won the London Independent Bookseller of the Year award at the annual British Book Awards ceremony in London - the first time that an Irish firm has been granted this accolade.
Perhaps the shop's recent and very handsome facelift had something to do with it, or maybe it was the fact that its staff nowadays seem much more alert to their customers than in bygone times (and, indeed, than in some of the other main bookstores in our capital city), but whatever the reason it's nice to see tribute being given to a local family business battling to hold its own against such powerful chain stores as Waterstone's and Dillon's (Hodges Figgis). Fred himself (whose grandfather took over the shop from the original owner, William Magee, in 1907) feels this, too: "At a time when the Dublin retail scene resembles more and more a UK high street it is important that indigenous Irish retailers are being recognised as just as good, and sometimes better than, their UK competitors."
And he adds: "We aim to be here in another hundred years." That's telling them.
Last year's biggest-selling book in the UK was Paul Wilson's Little Book of Calm. This chairman of an advertising agency in Sydney, Australia, has also written Little Book of Love, The Calm Technique, another book called Instant Calm and a new opus called Calm at Work.
In other words, Paul is big on calm, and if you want to experience his calming influence, he'll be in Hodges Figgis next Wednesday at 7.30pm. You have to buy a ticket to hear him speak, but stay calm, it will only set you back £2.