“... he related how the spirits of dead priests, dead friends, victims of the Troubles and finally James Joyce, appeared from the pilgrimage site of St Patrick’s Purgatory on Station Island to inform and rebuke him. Heaney implicitly presented himself as kin to Dante or Aeneas, or to T.S. Eliot in Dantesque prophetic mode: a poet who could absorb and ...”

“... he termed Dickensian fiction. Repeatedly he rebuked other novelists for failing to realise that James Joyce was the ‘Einstein of the novel’ and that the world had to be different after Ulysses. The unpityingness of this project (he is sometimes so savage that it must not always have been pleasant to be in the same room as him, and he is sometimes ...”

“... scene in 2013 with her first published novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, she proudly trailed James Joyce in her wake, claiming her allegiance to a European modernism which some have argued, wrongly I would say, has been betrayed by most of today’s fiction, in the UK at least (as if literature had prematurely taken the path of Brexit). McBride has ...”

“... Heaney didn’t feature in the first version of Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage (1974), Clive James’s satire on British literary life; but in the ‘improved version’, just two years later, he has become a fixture of the scene, ‘SEAMUS FEAMUS’, pictured tucking into a pub lunch of ‘two slabs of peat around a conger eel’ (‘Clive was very ...”

“... more glamorous than most of the actresses in the rest of the issue. ‘A genre is hardening,’ James Wood wrote in his review in the New Republic, and suddenly Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. When he repeated the charge in the Guardian after the 11 September attacks, she ...”

“... with the huge cloudy cosmogonies and highly personal symbolisms of the Prophetic Books’. James Joyce, apparently, was ‘son-ridden’. Ghost-ridden writers have included Amanda Ross (a C.S. Lewis favourite). There is a sort of bluff, bar-parlour (almost) manner in which Sayers sews up the Trinitarian response to life that might, if one were ...”

“... to the classical Greeks, we have our own archaic Chapman. To get a taste of his originality, try James Joyce, or Derek Walcott. For drama and pathos try Christopher Logue, and for sheer poetic artistry try Fitzgerald or Alexander Pope. And if, after this, you feel in need of some orality, have some friends round for dinner, put on some music and read it ...”

“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it ...”

“... In​ the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense seen through Strether’s eyes, there had been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary’ that ‘forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation ...”

“... But the plucking out of harsh views on friends and fellow writers (as with Leonard Woolf’s and James Strachey’s edition of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence with Lytton Strachey) was inevitable. The truth is that Murry added nothing to Katherine’s writing that was not already there, that he made her popular, and that he kept her work continually in ...”

“... has attracted me ever since I read Edmund Wilson’s early reviews of Stein, Hemingway, Woolf and Joyce; here was a man who, in the course of meeting his weekly deadline, just happened to chart the birth of Modernism. Oh sure, there was an element of luck involved – how often does a Ulysses just drop onto your desk? – but there was a certain skill on ...”

“... a better novelist than herself, and expressed a fear that she might ‘turn into a writer like James Joyce’; there was little danger. In the flurry of chatter and prophecy that preceded the publication of Daphne du Maurier the main emphasis was on the novelist’s homosexuality. Chatto’s handout spoke delicately of ‘her highly significant ...”

“... role’, but with a new despondency. He enlists the assistance of other artists, from Dante to James Joyce, and yearns guiltily for the ‘clumps’ and ‘clunks’ and ‘clogs’ of his most youthful verses. Not so guiltily, though, that he cannot welcome some jeering Joycean advice: ‘Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s ...”

“... old verses (after all, he reminded me, Arabs have produced good translations of Dylan Thomas and James Joyce) and was put out when I rejected them and gave him the new simplistic piece: but I was determined to ‘make my position clear’, so that no one thought me to represent some devious British foreign policy (if such there be) connected with the ...”

“... 39 which I wish you had asked me about’ is a typical opening to letters to authors and editors. James Joyce, for some complicated reason, ‘made a long attack on me in Finnegans Wake’. And so on. When in the 1950s she was mistaken, in her even-handedness, for a supporter of the witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, she wrote to J.B. Priestley: ‘I have ...”