“... 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 ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... the decline in people working on the land in Europe are stark. In Remembering Peasants, Patrick Joyce reports that in 1950 nearly half the population of Spain were agricultural workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was 23 per cent in 1950 and 3 per cent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... legend; she pleased herself, and others came round. When she wrote in a final exam for William James, ‘I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today,’ James understood, and gave her the highest grade in the class. She eventually graduated from Radcliffe magna cum ...”

“... There is at once a rather quaint obstacle. Most readers of Ulysses do not believe in omens, but Joyce eagerly did; in this he is genuinely like Homer. Four of the characters receive omens, and Joyce would regard these as an assurance that some great event would occur. Stephen on the previous night had a disturbing dream ...”

“... to Lord Byron’) that You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effect of ‘brass’, Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety The economic basis of society. A Suitable Boy is, like the novels of ...”

“... of authors people dream of reading, easily outclassing those former champions Tolstoy and Joyce. I also suspect that chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative ...”

“... at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young wife, Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because ...”

“... predecessor is lost – the first ever detective story or civilised thriller. The drama critic James Agate, who once savagely described Donald Wolfit’s Hamlet as a private detective watching the jewels at the Claudius-Gertrude wedding feast, may have said more than he knew. Yet to praise Hamlet as the first detective story makes sense mainly in terms of ...”

“... He will open a review, as if telling the boys, ‘Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903,’ ‘Alice James, born 1848, was the only sister of Henry James.’ And these decent and helpful conventions (now hopelessly out of date – a startling number of the intelligent young now know no history at all) will sometimes ...”

“... of 1618, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count of Gondomar, Ambassador of Philip III to the Court of James I had a clever idea. For four years the proposal that James’s son Prince Charles should marry the Infanta Maria had been batted to and fro between London and Madrid in an attempt to bring about an Anglo-Spanish ...”

“... them recalls, in its total transcendence of shame, the erotic correspondence in 1909 between James and Nora Joyce. Joyce, as Richard Ellmann puts it, ‘wishes to possess his wife’s soul, and have her possess him, in utter nakedness. To know someone else beyond love and ...”

“... all the confidence of the class without giving a damn about belonging to it. Oddly enough, Henry James was in the same position because, as Ralph Touchett says, ‘being an American here, you don’t belong to any class.’ The Portrait of a Lady is not about a lady in the English sense, but about a specimen of a particular sort of American girlhood, done as ...”