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“... conceding the lost battle. The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate: So much so that Joyce should have seen it coming Even through the eye-patch of his last years. He wrote a book full of nothing except writing For people who can’t do anything but read, And now their gestures clog the air around us. He asked for it, and we got ...”

“... The aim of this work,’ Colin MacCabe announces, ‘is not to provide the meaning of Joyce’s work but to allow it to be read.’ ‘Well, ta ever so,’ I wrote in the margin. In 1922, when Ulysses was first published and copies were burnt by the New York Post Office, or 1923, when copies were seized by the Folkestone Customs, English-reading people might have thanked Mr MacCabe for, at least, a kindly intention ...”

“... his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the ...”

“... does it feel, then, being dead?’) let him speak in his own voice, not like a Yorkshireman or James Joyce. That photograph and its violence sit in an alien silence where a fraught polyphony might speak, but not epiphany – transcendent insights that replace missed moments of religious grace are not just missing but unmissed as a quill in a cindery ...”

“... supply of mental giants. A Goethe now would lack words to loathe Newton. It’s forty years since James Joyce named the quark. Now nobody’s nonplussed to hear light rays Get sucked down holes so fast they show up dark. Nor would the converse of that news amaze. It all gets out of reach as it grows clear. What we once failed to grasp but still were ...”

“... judgment was handed down in a case brought against Macmillan and Danis Rose by the estate of James Joyce. Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition, edited by Rose, was published by Macmillan in 1997. Joyce died in 1941, and under the Copyright Act 1956 any of his work that appeared while he was alive passed out of copyright ...”

“... in whose work ordinariness achieves a highly individual and idiosyncratic literary status – James Joyce and Italo Svevo. Growing older, a bit despondent, never feeling quite well – these are the symptoms of Svevan man which we all recognise, and from which we suffer ourselves. The Svevan ordinary man belongs to no recognisable social ...”

“... apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic. Joyce relentlessly explicated it, and gave his fans the authorised version of its structure, but the user’s manual doesn’t limit the ways in which the book may be read. Nothing said about Ulysses seems to spoil it. But Finnegans Wake lacks this ...”

“... Joyce’s prose is ‘beautifully written’, as they used to say. Written, like his poems, in the old style of the Nineties. Paradoxically, it is not composed but spoken. The voice that echoes through it, the voices rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce ...”

“... that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious or unconscious, such was James Joyce’s strategy with regard to Dublin, to Ireland. From the age of 22 until his death at 58 he lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Switzerland and France, but his creative attention remained focused on the Dublin he grew up in. Though he ...”

“... the series gave me my first sight of the work of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson seems not to have attempted to ...”

“... prose’; he described the major long poem of his later years, ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’, as a ‘ragbag’, a poetic ‘Loch Ness Monster’. But critics are starting to recognise that neither the boasts nor the admissions of defeat are to be read too literally: his poetic task is both ‘impossible and imperative’. Nancy ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... interest in the collection and presentation of minute facts impressed one of his Glasgow auditors, James Boswell, whose marvellous accumulation. The Life of Samuel Johnson, is a major peak in the Scottish eclectic tradition. In Edinburgh, formulating the canon of the new university study of English Literature, Blair tried to inscribe a marked Scottish ...”