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“... Oxford, where he often felt lonely, but seems to have lived the fairly typical life of a Proust-Joyce-Firbank-reading undergraduate. Oxford memories soon became blurred for him, but he remembered sending an article on the subject of Oxford Decadence to the Isis, which was accepted by the then editor, Peter Fleming, but no meeting took place, a record of ...”

“... Brenda Maddox’s enjoyable biography of Nora Joyce left me worrying about two questions.* Did her subject warrant 526 pages? And was the great Richard Ellmann, along with other scholars, guilty of gross invasion of privacy when he published James Joyce’s coprophiliac letters to Nora? Both these questions are of personal significance for me ...”

“... the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free Fall, and to literary schools and ...”

“... edited by Mathews himself (who also funded it with a legacy from his grandfather), Ashbery, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. Like most avant-garde magazines, Locus Solus (named after Roussel’s second prose novel, published in 1914, and with an epigraph from his final long poem, from 1932, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique), was founded primarily as a ...”

“... of us would drive up into the Wicklow mountains, and only two of us would come back down. Yours, James Prendergast.’ He puts this into an envelope addressed ‘Mr Georges Bidault, Paris, France’, and pops it in the post. A few days later (Benny now departed), there is a knock at the door. My father, alone in the flat, opens the door. A Special Branch ...”

“... British social history over the last four decades: Ross McKibbin, Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. I should say before I go any further that I too am a modern British historian: this is my subject and my tribe. I’ve met the dedicatees, most of the editors and a majority of the contributors to these volumes; a few are good friends. But for several ...”

“... O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their books. In Ulysses Leopold Bloom, in musing on the ...”

“... Aristotle’s phronesis led the poet back towards a native American pragmatism, recalling William James at Harvard but also providing critical anticipations of Richard Rorty. The truth is no doubt messier than these formulations suggest – say, that Eliot after a time was content to assimilate rather than extend his philosophical learning, but that the ...”

“... yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The Middle Years’ is amused by the view that his latest novel is ‘the best thing he has done yet’: it ‘made such a grand avenue of the future’. This story is alluded to in detail in The Ghost Writer and is structurally as well as ...”

“... or even into unpunctuated monologues. Perhaps most of the time, as Nabokov complained about Joyce, we do not think in words at all. As soon as a fictional character thinks ‘aloud’ in any depth, the writer has to represent something which is not normally represented, and the character doing the thinking often has the air of ...”

“... John Cage’s Writing Through Finnegans Wake. This volume consists of phrases copied out from Joyce and arranged on separate lines in such a way that the letters JAMES JOYCE, repeated four times per page, may be read vertically down the centre; miscellaneous semi-colons and parentheses are scattered ad lib around ...”

“... book, this manic travelogue of a city about to burn, and I can’t even begin to answer.’ Well, James Joyce knew the answer: it’s written all over Ulysses, the Sandymount episode in particular. Sinclair knows the answer too, and so do we all, although we are generally too embarrassed to mention it. Think about the joke about the insomniac dyslexic ...”

“... quotations from fogies of yore condemning innovations – the harmonics of Wagner, the prose of James Joyce – that have since achieved canonical status. Mitchell does not disappoint us on this score. He quotes Constant Lambert, in the Thirties, attacking jazz. Mitchell’s logic is slightly different from that of his predecessors. Their argument is ...”

“... golden opinions by executing what must have been a very delicate commission – a cover story on James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. So by the time that Chambers fired Bellow in 1945, he was himself in the very middle of his journey. He had led a shadowy life in which he dreaded two varieties of exposure. He had been badly frightened, both physically and ...”

“... and an eye for the subtly comic. He was devoted to Witze, witty paradoxes and contradictions. When Joyce told him reprovingly that he never used coarse language but only wrote it, Svevo commented: ‘It would appear then that his works are not ones that could be read in his own presence.’ Confessions of Zeno is full of such Witze, large and small: Zeno’s ...”