“... 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 ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or ...”

“... those lives themselves are less significant? ‘Colour is not a human or personal reality,’ James Baldwin said, ‘it is a political reality.’ Substitute ‘gender’, ‘ethnic identity’ or ‘class’ for the word ‘colour’, and one sees how far-ranging and how potentially anarchic the controversy is. And how far from being resolved, or even ...”

“... Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.’ Cumberbatch’s sweating intensifies. His jumper has been nibbled by the only moths on earth that are beneath his idol’s notice. Vladimir toys sardonically with the ...”

“... from St Elizabeths in 1958, and then, in 1967, his extensive and fascinating correspondence with James Joyce. But it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the archive floodgates really opened. These decades saw the appearance of volumes individually devoted to Pound’s letters not only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford ...”

“... the hour’, recommending with lyrical urgency that writers should instead ‘look within’, as James Joyce had begun to do in Ulysses, in an attempt to render the ‘myriad impressions’ received by ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’. But ‘Modern Fiction’ is rarely read in context. On either side of it in The Common Reader, like the ...”

“... it in Essays in Criticism (April 1989). Yet, as H.M. Daleski points out in the same collection, Joyce has effectively eclipsed Lawrence as the representative or iconic 20th-century novelist. Commentary on Joyce far exceeds commentary on Lawrence, both in quantity and quality – commentary of all kinds too, for ...”

“... and Sterne, both of whom parody mechanical materialism by hacking the mental down to the physical. Joyce sometimes does the same. Deflating and debunking are common devices in Irish prose. Bathos is one of its most recurrent tropes. Not many high-minded ideals can stand up to those sick cows and lashing rain. In 1916, the nationalist rebels produced posters ...”

“... whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they are ...”

“... Seven Gables and The Portrait of a Lady, or for that matter between Daphnis and Chloe and Ulysses. James admitted that there was no definite boundary between novel and romance, but he knew that in such extreme cases there was no problem telling one from the other. Of course you can argue that there is realism in Longus, and myth in ...”

“... and gifted, though she wrote almost nothing, with a verbal inventiveness greater than that of James Joyce. This is to demean by overstatement, as John Stuart Mill famously demeaned Harriet Taylor in his Autobiography by his reckless eulogising of her.Hélène was also accused by those who had known the pre-war Althusser as a decorous lycéen and good ...”

“... is therefore ‘closed’ to aberrant interpretations. Ian Fleming is a writer of closed texts, James Joyce a writer of open texts. We have here an important critical distinction, corresponding to the more familiar distinction between mechanical contrivance and creative art. Unfortunately, semiosis soon sets in, and the distinction rots away. The text ...”

“... Phoenix, the American base not far from the airport. The red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with the multiple-passport-wielding aura of a Graham Greene character. He was Unicef’s man in Sudan for a long time. He feels this is a crucial moment for Afghanistan and is sure that the current situation, with rising violence and troop ...”