It started as a makeshift notion but managed to live on as an oversight. That's what they say about the Times Literary Supplement, which will be 100 years old on January 17th. Originally given out free with the London Times, the TLS was first published to relieve pressure on the paper while parliament was in session, but by 1914 it had become autonomous and was being sold separately for a penny.
T.S. Eliot, Virgina Woolf and George Orwell are among a long list of contributors and, until as late as 1974, writers contributed anonymously. Now large-scale centenary celebrations are in train, including a big bash at Porchester Hall in London on the actual anniversary. There will also be a series of lectures at London's National Portrait Gallery. Ian McEwan will talk on 'The Writer's Life' (January 10th) and Seamus Heaney will read (January 31st).
Most interesting perhaps is the launch of the TLS Creative Student Writing Prize, a competition for students to describe their best or worst book of the century, the winner getting an internship on the weekly literary journal - now there's a prize worth winning. It is also planning a round-table debate at New York's Algonquin Hotel. For more details check out www.the-tls.co.uk
The latest - fifth - issue of The Dublin Review is out this week containing a letter from Ground Zero by novelist Patrick McGrath, whose New York home is just a few hundred yards away. "The best we can hope for is to continue to live in dread. Another 'monstrous dose of reality', as Susan Sontag called it, may at any time overwhelm the fragile structures of everyday life. All projections of the future are tentative, provisional, now," he writes.
The same issue, with perfect timing, also contains a piece on Virginia Woolf's America by Andrew McNeillie, editor of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, as well as her essay 'America, Which I Have Never Seen'. Though she never got there, her view of the US and its citizens is remarkably insightful. While the English have, she writes, shadows that stalk behind, Americans have a light that dances in front of them. In short "that is what makes them the most interesting people in the world - they face the future, not the past".
Incidentally, if you're still casting around for a Christmas present for someone with an inquiring mind who loves good writing, a subscription to The Dublin Review could be just the thing.
With so many fiction prizes around, it's great to see a new history prize announced. The publisher Grove Atlantic and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London have announced a prize designed to encourage professional historians to write for a more general readership. The first award will be made next July.
The Library Association of Ireland has welcomed the campaign called Babies Love Books, whereby 65,000 babies and their families will get a free package of five books next year, thanks to the Department of Education and Science. Public-health nurses will be handing over the books at the nine-month check-up. Talk about getting them early! Though Sadbh can see an awful lot of chewing and gnawing on books at clinics all over the land, it's still an exciting venture, and we'll be looking out for bookworms zooming by in their buggies, books in hand, oblivious to the world.