SEAMUS HEANEY is one of eight Nobel laureates, including Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer and Derek Walcott, who are expressing their "horror" at the death sentence recently passed on another Nobel winner, Wole Soyinka. Signing their names to a letter in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, they state that "the government of Nigeria has once more set out along the path of condemning to death one of our fellow writers".
They continue: "Because we recall the tragic abuse of legality that led to the judicial murder of another fellow writer, Ken Saro Wiwa, by this same government, in 1995, we are bound to take with the greatest seriousness the threat to Soyinka's life posed by these proceedings.
"Though Wole Soyinka is already living in exile, we hope he will be offered proper protection by the governments of all nations that respect fundamental human rights, because we cannot have confidence that his life is safe even outside Nigeria from a government so scornful of elementary principles of justice and humanity."
Coincidentally, just as these fears by his colleagues were being voiced, Soyinka featured on a BBC Radio 4 programme outlining his view of Utopia. Presenter Michael O'Donnell asked him if his Utopia was anything like Nigeria, to which Soyinka replied: Well, it's certainly not like Lagos, which I think should be sunk.
His choice of a leader for his Utopia would be someone "along the lines of Nelson Mandela, "and, curiously enough, I would also take someone like de Klerk. I would most certainly not take Abacha with me ... Abacha is the present pig who dominates the scene in Nigeria. I would have a mechanism in Utopia which ensured that aberrations like Abacha were confined to one of those spaces in Dante's Hell."
That's what most of us like to call freedom of speech, but the Nigerian government undoubtedly has another word for it.
SOME good bargains are currently to be found in the basement of Hodges Figgis, Dawson Street. While the Penguin paperback edition of Austin Clarke's Selected Poems, with a fine introduction by its editor, W.J. McCormack, sells everywhere at £7.99 sterling, you'll find in Hodges Figgis the handsome 1991 Lilliput Press hardback reduced from £15.9 5 to £7.99. The cover states that the editor is Hugh Maxton which, of course, is W.J. McCormack's pen name as a poet.
If you enjoyed The Last Modernist, Anthony Cronin's elegant and absorbing unofficial biography of Beckett, and want to read some earlier observations by the same writer on the same subject, you'll encounter them in Heritage Now: Irish Literature in the English Language, which was published by Brandon in 1982 and is now selling for £4.95 hardback. This series of essays ranges from Maria Edgeworth, George Moore, Synge and Joyce to Beckett, Kavanagh, MacNeice and Flann O'Brien, about all of whom Cronin has interesting things to say.
WHY are English publishers so fascinated by the tedious antics of Virginia Woolf and her cronies, the sillinesses of the Sitwells and the tiresome in fightings of the pre war Oxford generation? Admittedly it's been at least, oh, a month since I've come across a new book on the Bloomsbury bores, but to and behold, here's yet another tome about Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly.
What is it about Connolly that excites such attention from biographers and cultural historians? He wrote one execrable novel (The Rock Pool), one dated mishmash of lazy philosophising and weary hedonism (The Unquiet Grave) and one rather good mix of autobiography and criticism (Enemies of Promise) By my reckoning, that makes him a very marginal figure, but seemingly the English intelligentsia can't get enough of him.
I'm prompted to these reflections after reading an extract from Jeremy Lewis's new biography of Connolly, which is to be published next month by Cape. In particular I was struck by this breathless entry from Connolly's diary: "Evelyn (unaware that I was watching him when he tasted the claret - and after a rather uninteresting white Haut Brion with the fish) raised his glass, sipped it, and nodded his head vigorously - and then took the rest. What more could one ask?"
A lot, actually: If daft snobberies of this sort are what most exercised Connolly, it's no wonder that the work now seems so feeble. Yet the highbrow media still adore the mere thought of him. A mystery.