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“... disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form of an ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... they knew that it was modern.’ The modernists certainly took to her; she was published alongside James Joyce, positively reviewed by H.D. and praised as being ‘above praise’ by Marianne Moore. ‘If we choose to leave the poems of Charlotte Mew out of our literary heritage,’ Moore wrote, ‘we are leaving out an original.’The speakers of Mew’s ...”

“... behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to sue. When, appeased by a row with the ...”

“... Frank Norris’s novel The Pit is set; Studs Lonigan’s street corner on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his rich employer’s daughter; Nelson Algren’s Division Street; the train station where Louis Armstrong was met by King ...”

“... you might find him not interesting, so don’t do it unless you feel like doing nothing one day. Joyce does like him however, and I’m genuinely fond of him tho’ he’s maddeningly young. After the visit, McGreevy wrote to Yeats again: ‘Beckett wrote me about his visit to you. I’m glad you liked him. He was completely staggered by the pictures and ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ...”

“... and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were rationed. Céline took ...”

“... Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge both his customary admiration for the truly great and his anxiety about not being great himself. And ...”

“... gay literature the novels of William Burroughs and Jean Genet or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or James Merrill simply because these works are superior, serious and consecrated is a rearguard action designed to trivialise the label ‘gay art’. It is also a strategy to recuperate for a purely imaginary if politically charged category of ‘universal ...”

“... felt a rather puritanical sense of guilt about his own relish for language (he was an admirer of James Joyce), and believed he had to repress it in the interests of political utility. Such an attitude is scarcely conducive to producing major fiction. Fiction is a problem in a puritan nation, even if English literature is strewn with instances of great ...”

“... language of the Schools. In English, in this century, it has mostly been used by Irish writers: by Joyce, with Vico and scatology, by Beckett, with velleity and bananas, and by Flann O’Brien, one paragraph of whose At-Swim-Two-Birds includes both an argumentum on Rousseau and the sudden eructation of ‘buff-coloured puke’. Now there is a new ...”

“... with precision – or else in a kaleidoscope of punning imprecision. He can make you think of James Joyce – who came late to Rabelais and often uses similar techniques for other ends. Sainéan showed that many words found in Gargantua and Pantagruel were either not attested before Rabelais or became known through him. The same applies to quite a ...”

“... about being an ill-educated ‘peasant’. Nevertheless he seized on Heraclitus, Hopkins and James Joyce in particular in his one year as a student and developed demanding tastes in music, literature and art. Graham became a farm-labourer in Galway, travelled with a fair and worked on the docks in Dublin to avoid conscription in 1939, but failed his ...”

“... a moment near the start of Ulysses when a symbol for the whole of Irish art presents itself to Joyce’s exasperated alter ego: ‘the cracked looking-glass of a servant’. As a gloss on this we have, among other commentaries, the remarks of G.J. Watson in his study of 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival. ...”