There is always indispensable reading in the New York Review of Books: Joan Didion on Clinton and the media two issues back, Lars-Erik Nelson on Kenneth Starr and Brad Leithauser on Cole Porter in the last issue, and Fintan O'Toole on Peter Brook and Darryl Pinckney on James Baldwin in the current one.
That's the important stuff. Then there are the personal ads, which have long been one of this august journal's incidental pleasures, though they appear to have got a bit tame of late. Perhaps it's just the problem of soliciting love in a time of AIDS or inviting lewdness in an era of political correctness, but whatever the reason, the come-ons and pleadings in the NYRB these days aren't as sexually obvious as I seem to recall they used to be.
Indeed, in place of naked longing there's an obsession with that most-desired soul-mate of today's puritan America, the nonsmoker - I have stopped counting the number of recent NYRB ads which sternly (nay, witheringly) specify an aversion to tobacco as a must for any intending respondents.
Happily, the Personals in that magazine's English counterpart, the London Review of Books, still believe that cakes and ale are more important than abstinence from the weed, and are still refreshingly direct about their real inclinations.
In the current issue, for instance (which also has excellent pieces by Ian Hamilton and John Mullan on Orwell and Swift respectively), my eye was caught by "Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53, seeks short-sighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite."
That's telling it like it is, as are "Illiterate old bastard with not a single book in sight seeks someone to read poetry and wash away the interminable cynicism that comes with reading this magazine. Must harbour profound hatred of Tuscany," and "67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur picking my toothless way through the urban sprawl, self-destructive, sliding towards pathos, jacked up on Viagra and on the lookout for a contortionist who plays the trumpet."
Yes, there'll always be an England.
The passing of Ted Hughes has had scores of British commentators wondering about his probable successor as Poet Laureate. Andrew Motion, James Fenton, Wendy Cope and Tony Harrison have been among those suggested, but the most mentioned name has been that of Seamus Heaney.
Yes, he was born in Northern Ireland, which technically makes him eligible, and Dan Glaister in the Guardian feels that he "could perhaps be persuaded to take the post as a gesture of reconciliation in the light of the Northern Ireland peace settlement", but Mr Glaister also points out that back in the Eighties when the Nobel laureate was included in an anthology of British poetry, he responded with the lines:
Be advised my passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast the Queen.
So his acceptance would seem rather unlikely. Personally, I think Wendy Cope, who is a good poet and can write light verse that's both accessible and amusing, would be a good choice, but whether she'd want to be burdened with penning paeans of praise to the Royals is another matter.
Two books by Cork-born journalists appear this week. Marino describe Danny and Clare are Splitting Up, a first novel by Frank Coughlan, who currently works in the Evening Herald, as "a bittersweet account of the start of a love affair and the end of a marriage between a lad who never grows up and a woman who's only learning her own strengths".
Also from Mercier is All Our Yesterdays, by Declan Hassett, who is the arts editor of the Examiner. This is a loving memoir of growing up in Cork city and is an elegantly produced hardback with lots of evocative photographs.
Also evocative of the past are two other Mercier titles released for the Christmas market, both of them compiled by former primary school headmaster Thomas F. Walsh.
The Illustrated Favourite Poems We Learned at School collects fifty much-loved poems from three earlier volumes, and presents them handsomely, with many accompanying photographs. And if readers of a certain age want to be reminded of the set texts of their primary education, Favourite Lessons We Learned at School will certainly do the trick, though I have to say I went down this vividly atmospheric memory lane with mixed emotions.
When I was in college, Fergus Linehan was film critic for this newspaper, and his reviews were so informed, perceptive and elegantly written that each week I looked forward to them in pleasurable anticipation. Damn it, he's one of the reasons I became a journalist.
I've always wished he wrote more as a critic, but instead he risked the wrath of critics (much lesser ones, at that) by writing for the stage. Now he's a novelist, too, and on Wednesday night in the Gaiety Michael Colgan launched his second work of fiction, The Safest Place (Town House).
This was one of the most crowded and lively book launches I've been at in quite some time, but then, apart from being an outstanding writer, Fergus Linehan has long been one of the most liked people in this usually spiteful and unmannerly town.