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“... When Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, the embarrassed author remarked that at least some of the audience was clapping. These approvers were powerless to out-clamour the ‘hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs’, whose roars were ‘like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal zoo’, but for James they represented ‘the forces of civilisation ...”

“... Garcia Marquez more nearly resembles a novelist who otherwise has few parallels in these matters: James Joyce. Joyce anticipates Garcia Marquez in making the idea of career, the sequence of published works, itself a raw material for authorial design. For many readers, Ulysses is the most valuable of ...”

“... and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does not discuss the Stanislaus ...”

“... partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before he took over the Dial, he wrote James Joyce a cheque for $700; it came to Joyce from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was ...”

“... to lay down petroleum deposits – ‘on whose behalf,’ Calvino adds, ‘we do not know.’ James Joyce began his career as a social historian of ‘scrupulous meanness’, and ended up with Finnegans Wake, which is both an avatar of the Arabian Nights and a vast, impossibly prolix history of the world. Calvino, too, broadens out, his later work ...”

“... The Woman’s Room, a university teacher and is in her forties. But French’s specialism was James Joyce, whereas Durer’s is Renaissance literature, so there’s no question of The Bleeding Heart’s being autobiographical. The opening of the novel finds Dolores on sabbatical leave, travelling between the British Library and the Bodleian. She ...”

“... Women have their resource – the romantic imagination. This faculty, which Jane Austen (and James Joyce, for that matter) considered so destructive, is the secret ‘richness’ of Barbara Pym’s heroines. ‘Richness’ is a favourite word. It means plenty of human behaviour to observe, leading to a wildly sympathetic flight of fancy into the ...”

“... one of the occupational hazards of retrospective narration: the cliché of the one small moment. James Joyce once wrote a memorable parody of this – ‘I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our ...”

“... Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at ...”

“... in his application. One or two historic moments nonetheless stand out. Hearing that the young James Joyce is about to soar on his Icarus-like wings from Dublin to Paris, Yeats writes him a kindly note on the advice of Lady Gregory, treats him to breakfast during his London stopover and offers to march him around the odd literary editor. It is a ...”

“... If the continuing passion for Ulysses is remarkable, so is the fact that the book exists at all. Joyce made a few preliminary stabs at the novel at the beginning of 1914, while polishing off A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and working more earnestly on Exiles. He was a heavy drinker who would nowadays be considered an alcoholic; he was penniless and ...”

“... of references’ without which ‘it is spurious to discuss a long poem like In Memoriam James Joyce’. This sort of background work ought to be done and she seems well-equipped to do it. Harvey Oxenhorn’s book is of a different character. It is a critical assessment of the kind which used to be done summarily in an essay but which modern ...”

“... A famous passage in Henry James’s Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne laments the absence for the writer in America of every relation and institution which made writing socially viable – an army and a navy and a church and a court, and classes and village squires and evening parties. James’s view of the materials available to the writer may strike us today as somewhat old-fashioned and unenterprising, but there is a basic shrewdness in what he says ...”

“... of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to ...”

“... that.’ Using Biography is devoted to six authors: Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot and Joyce. The central essays had been printed before, but are here revised and supplemented. Three related principles unify the book, all argued for and all good-naturedly shocked at the pretty pass to which things have come. First, that the knowledge of what a ...”