Did you know that Seamus Heaney is a centurion and that W.B. Yeats and James Joyce are centurions, too, as are John Millington Synge and George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, not to mention (while we're being resolutely chauvinistic) Dublin-born Francis Bacon?
So what's a centurion? According to the dictionary, a centurion was "the officer commanding a Roman century," which squares with my hazy memory of Caesar, but, as far as I know, Seamus never commanded a Roman century, nor did W.B. or Sam or James - nor, come to that, John or George or Francis.
No, these latter-day centurions are the hundred artists chosen by a BBC Radio 3 panel of experts as representing all that's culturally important in the 20th century, and among the hundred names finally decided upon are the above-mentioned Irish contingent.
Like all such lists, of course, it's both arbitrary and gimmicky, the real purpose being to fill the Radio 3 schedules for the next two years with a programme every Sunday devoted to each artist (musicians aren't included, as Radio 3 has separate plans for them).
And like all such lists, this one is already proving to be controversial. Commentators are gasping that Damien Hirst is included, but not Lucian Freud, that Buster Keaton is there but not Charlie Chaplin, and that only ten women make it into the Top 100.
Causing particular outrage is the omission of Simone de Beauvoir. Indeed, John Carey, one of the selecting panel, declares: "Not to have her is a major mistake. She was a gigantic cultural figure. For God's sake, feminism is a cultural influence."
However, fellow panellist A.S. Byatt isn't having any of that. "I knocked her out on principle," she sniffs. "She had been nominated for The Second Sex and I thought it too polemical."
As that last remark implies, each artist was chosen for one particular work - Heaney for Death of a Naturalist, Joyce for Ulysses, Beckett for Waiting for Godot, Shaw for Pygmalion , Synge for The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats for Sailing to Byzantium, and Bacon for Innocent Screams. So essentially it's a hundred works rather than a hundred artists that are being celebrated.
Incidentally, more than eighty of the people on the list are dead and only two are under sixty - Heaney and Hirst. This perhaps reflects the ages of the judges, all of whom are over sixty, except for Oxford professor Jean Aitchison, who is fifty-nine.
And as if the brouhaha over that isn't enough, here comes yet another Joyce row to weary us all - this time involving, not Danis Rose and the Joyce estate (that was last year), but John Kidd and the Joyce estate. Next year, for all I know, it may be the Spice Girls and the Joyce estate.
Anyway, here's the nub of the new spat. Professor Kidd, who is the head of the James Joyce Research Centre at Boston University, completed an edition of Ulysses in 1994, and wants to bring it out now, claiming that because the book was published in 1922, the American copyright to it expired on the last day of 1997 - seventy-five years after it was published.
The Joyce estate, on the other hand, insist that as the book was banned in the United States until 1936, it remains in copyright until 2011, and they have hired hotshot American agent Andrew Wylie to fight the case for them.
So who is in the right? And more importantly, do you honestly give a fiddler's? Well, the Joyce estate obviously do, as it's conservatively estimated that they've been making $200,000 a year in American alone from its continuance in copyright, but the rest of us may feel like telling them all to have their unedifying little squabble in private.
Now where's my old Bodley Head edition of Ulysses? Or is it heretical to read that nowadays?
At the end of every year the same old friend presents me with a copy of Waterstone's Diary, my elegant indispensable desk companion for the twelve months.
Still, in its listing of a notable literary event for each day of the year, it's often decidedly odd, not to mention bizarre. For instance, this year's diary informs me that thirty-one years ago on January 22nd next, Joe Orton met Paul McCartney to discuss a screenplay for an unproduced Beatles movie, while neglecting to point out that Lord Byron and August Strindberg were both born on that day.
Eccentric priorities persist throughout. I'm told that Virginia Woolf suffered a nervous breakdown eighty-three years ago on March 26th but not that A.E. Housman, Robert Frost and Tennessee Williams were born the same day. I learn, too, that James Joyce and Marcel Proust met on May 18th, 1922, but did not "get along", yet am denied information that George Meredith and William Saroyan died on that day.
And while I'm fascinated that on September 19th 1973 Paul Theroux took the 15.30 train from Victoria to set off on one of his travels, I'd rather have known that William Golding and Penelope Mortimer entered the world on the same day.
Still, the diary is a pleasure both to handle and to use, and I'm excited to learn from it that Enid Blyton was born on November 28th 1968, the same day and year that she died. And all those books in between! Now that's what I call a prodigy.