This week Miriam O'Callaghan interviews Declan Kiberd, Professor and Anglo Irish Literature and Drama in UCD and his former student Dr Derek Hand who now teaches English in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra.

Declan explains to Miriam that his teaching career in UCD will end in May of this year when he moved to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. He says that what he will miss most about UCD is the daily interaction with the students at the College. Derek explains the particular gifts that Declan has as a teacher, while Declan explains the satisfaction of seeing his students make progress in the world.

Both Declan and Derek explain to Miriam how they first discovered reading. Declan recalls the support his father gave him by matching his savings to help him buy books. Declan recalls finding notebooks that his mother made when she was a teenager of books that meant a lot to her. This connection through books across the generations was important to him. He was also influenced in believing that books were important as he witnessed the furore when his old primary school teacher, John McGahern was fired from the school for, as the children believed, writing a "dirty" book. Derek describes how as a teenager, he turned his hand to writing poetry with no success, but the impulse to find the right words to express a feeling and finding those words in other peoples work has made him love reading.

Both men reflect on their fathers and their disappointment in not being able to show them their published work. Declan recalled how his book Inventing Ireland, written with his father in mind, arrived back from the publishers some months after his father's death.

Declan and Derek reflect on the changing value placed on an education in the Humanities. Declan explains how the marriage of culture, enterprise and politics found in the Irish Literary Revival might help us better manage our affairs today.

If they could only bring one volume to a desert island, Derek would choose Ulysess while Declan would choose the complete works of WB Yeats.

Declan's most recent book is Ulysses and Us - the art of everyday living (Faber) while Derek's most recent book is A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge University Press)