Acclaim for Irish writing continues. Some months back, Ulysses was named novel of the century by The Modern Library, and now Waiting for Godot is declared play of the century in a survey of eight hundred dramatists, actors, directors and critics undertaken by the National Theatre in Britain.
Four other Irish works appear in the list of twenty greatest plays - Pygmalion (12), Juno and the Paycock (15), Heartbreak House (16) and The Playboy of the Western World (18) - while Conor McPherson's The Weir is included in the top hundred.
However, Synge doesn't make it into the survey's companion list of twenty greatest dramatists, in which Beckett comes third behind Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, with Shaw in sixth place, O'Casey in eleventh and Friel in seventeenth.
The most startling omissions from the list are David Mamet, Alan Bennett and Alan Ayckbourn.
Arnold Wesker, whose 1959 play, Roots, comes fortyfifth in the list, looks set to raise a few eyebrows and quicken a few pulses with his latest literary opus.
The King's Daughters, based on the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale of the same name, comprises twelve explicitly erotic tales which were turned down by various publishers when Wesker submitted them anonymously. Finally, he put his name to them and they were accepted by Quartet.
He insists that the stories are not pornographic, his intention being to see if literary language rather than crude terminology could be used to arouse readers. You can decide for yourself when the book is published next week.
Nobody sells like Maeve Binchy - well, no other Irish writer, anyway. Hughes & Hughes tell me that in their Dublin Airport outlet alone, Maeve's new novel, Tara Road, was bought by 15,000 people in its first four weeks.
Pretty amazing, though not quite as amazing as the record set by Delia Smith, whose cookbooks have sold over ten million copies, making her by a long stretch Britain's most commercially successful author, with 78 per cent of the sales being for hardback editions.
Her latest, How to Cook, was bought by 1,000 people in one supermarket on the day it was published, while audiences for the first programme of the accompanying television series exceeded 4.5 million. Other food authors are desperately trying to discover the secret ingredient in her recipe.
Brendan Graham, as you all know, wrote those Eurovision hits Rock `n' Roll Kids and The Voice and, in an earlier incarnation, was both a basketball international and a recipient of a business studies award in Australia.
But there's obviously no end to this 53-year-old Tipperary man's versatility, because next month HarperCollins are publishing his first novel.
The 546-page The Whitest Flower is billed as "the triumph of one woman amidst Ireland's despair" - the despair in question arising from the Great Famine. It's not your typical blockbuster, though, given that it boasts an eight-page bibliography of reference books, sixteen pages of quotations from historical sources and a four-page glossary of Irish and Anglo-Irish words and phrases.
Writing in the Observer last Sunday, Nobel laureate David Trimble declares: "William Butler Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature 75 years ago this year, observed that `peace comes droppin' slow' "
Well, not quite, David. What he actually wrote was that "peace comes dropping slow," but shure, faith and begorrah, de poem reads better widout dat silly "g" stuck on de end of de word.