“... toughness they mirror. With dozens of books on subjects as various as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, geodesic domes and computer poetry to his credit, Hugh Kenner, one of the moving forces behind the California series, is the éminence grise of American Modernism. It is not hard to imagine why he likes cartoons in general and Chuck Jones in ...”

“... cinema could do the job so much better. The novel should find a new function for itself. Back to James Joyce, in a way, who opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. In 1973 Johnson suggested that the human craving for storytelling was served by television soaps. It still is. Johnson’s prose is, in itself, Orwellian in its lucidity. It harbours much ...”

“... that of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain and, before them, of George Moore and James Joyce – had established it as the quintessential genre for a society still in the process of inventing itself. If the novel dealt with established societies such as England or France, the theory went, then the short story was better calibrated to ...”

“... He identifies strongly with the English-Irish Oxfordian as the classic double agent from (as James Joyce has it) one of the capitals of duplicity, ‘Doublin’. The piquant blend of patrician and Paddy, of levity and high seriousness, comes naturally, he says, to both of them: ‘He fled a stagnant colony in time-honoured Irish fashion with only ...”

“... Jones. Eliot regarded In Parenthesis as a ‘work of genius’ and bracketed Jones with Pound, Joyce and himself. He was also something of a friend. Thomas, though socially and poetically more distant, appeared in radio adaptations of In Parenthesis and, later, The Anathemata, his voice no doubt giving an impression that Jones, who was raised in London and ...”

“... gallows, as is clear from this volume of last speeches edited by the indefatigable Irish historian James Kelly. The speech from the gallows, along with the sermon, the sectarian pamphlet, the tall tale, the statement from the dock, the denunciation from the church altar and the address from the hustings, are among the most venerable of Irish literary ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... All these will be gathered, sorted and reclothed in flesh. Jacopus da Voragine imagines the martyr James the Dismembered sweetly apostrophising his body as he is tortured: ‘Go third toe, to thy companions, and as the grain of wheat bears much fruit, so shalt thou rest with thy fellows unto the last day ... Be comforted, little toe, because great and small ...”

“... epistolary novel The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, published in 1806. A century later, James Joyce drew attention to the supposed links between Ireland and the Phoenicians in a lecture entitled ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’. Speaking in Trieste, he said that the Irish language ‘is eastern in origin, and has been identified by ...”

“... in a time-warp, in the linear narrative tradition of American naturalism. His title is taken from James Joyce (of all people), but the 40-year time-span and bifurcated narrative of his new novel are more reminiscent of Arnold Bennett. Yates’s story, which could have split neatly into three volumes, divides at the point where Michael and Lucy ...”

“... course’ in Romanian slang. In the same notes, Isou declared that lettrisme developed the work of James Joyce, and that, like Joyce, he would be ‘MARE OM DIN LUME’ – ‘A GREAT MAN IN THE WORLD’. He also wrote for Mântuirea, a Zionist weekly, addressing a wide range of subjects: Surrealist painting, Stalin ...”

“... merits of different weapons systems might not be sound. If Menaul sees matters in black and white, James Avery Joyce has no doubts about seeing them in white and black. He uses strong language – in my view rightly – to describe and denounce the arms race with its senseless overkill capacity, and with the frightening ...”

“... Victorian novelist. As for the sartorial descriptions in Surtees, they resemble nothing so much as James Joyce when the latter is indulging his appetite for specificity about garments and their constituents to the hilt – as in the Circe episode of Ulysses. There are so many of these passages in Surtees that it is hard to select one for quotation, and ...”

“... as he is to enjoy; he did not want scholars to puzzle for a lifetime over his meaning and thought James Joyce, who did, ‘dotty’. So there are no revelations as to what he is saying, just an examination of how he says it. Nor did Waugh quite start at random and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when ...”

“... most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who ...”