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“... In 1914 Patrick MacGill’s first novel, Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. In the same year, Joyce’s Dubliners sold 499 copies, 120 of them bought by the author. In 1915, MacGill published a companion novel, The Rat-Pit, which was also highly successful and contained a Preface in which the author avowed himself to be ‘highly gratified’ by the success attained by Children of the Dead End ‘in Britain and abroad ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... 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 offering ...”

“... new novel centres on Bloomsday, the annual celebration in Dublin of the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Many nations celebrate mythical events, but Ireland commemorates a fictional one. It is as if Britain were to dedicate a feast day to Falstaff or to the Artful Dodger. For some in Ireland, Bloomsday is a useful alternative to ...”

“... judgment and the judgment abroad arises frequently in post-colonial literatures, and the case of Patrick White illustrates its complexities. First, how ‘Australian’ is White? He was born in London but of parents who were both Australians of grazier stock. He returned to Australia during his first year of life and lived in Sydney until the age of 13. So ...”

“... 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 Davenport, after ...”

“... the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid writing of him as a brother since my interest in him was mainly as ...”

“... Trinidadian novelist’. This might place him with such non-British writers as Nadine Gordimer and Patrick White, but he is later included in Bradbury’s alphabetical checklist of British novelists since 1876. It looks as if an adverse judgment has been passed by default. It is not that Bradbury shies away from evaluative criticism: the book is full of ...”

“... displays an infectious narrative style which ranges from Old Testament pastiche to bits of sub-Joyce interior monologue. Beneath the Gothic fantasy and the reflections of a real world of office flirtations, boardroom battles and editorial vendettas, what holds this strange pot-pourri together is the author’s obsessive, pedantic wit. The narrative is ...”

“... Ireland, and the Irish Language and Culture. I should report that the magazine, after an issue on Joyce and the Arts in Ireland, has now gone international with a Latin American issue and one on Socialism and Culture. The editors of the Bag are university teachers, gifted in literature and philosophy, and, it seems, determined to let these commitments take ...”

“... adumbrated a mystery central to drama: who is being watched, and by whom? Went to a matinee of Re:Joyce!, Maureen Lipman’s brilliant impersonation of Joyce Grenfell at the Fortune Theatre. An odd experience. Grenfell, whose solo performances were based on the accurate re-creation of closely observed social mannerisms, is ...”

“... blather?’ he asks early on. S., too, we are told, is not only a self-proclaimed successor of Joyce but a sexist and a pretentious creep. Later the reader is accused of boredom, voyeurism (‘And what about the screwing?’ we are supposed to be asking, as if there were not already enough of it) and ‘systematic hostility’. Should one plead ...”

“... Catalan while the rest of Spain was Moorish. And the attempt, too, by Yeats and Synge, and indeed Joyce, to embrace modernity and Europe as a way of keeping England at bay was close to Domènech’s use of iron and steel and modern systems while Spain slept. There were echoes, too, between the careers of Joyce and ...”

“... College Dublin, was rejecting ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ by a young troublemaker called James Joyce. He wasn’t turned down by everyone: his description of the Irish Homestead as ‘the pigs’ paper’ may have been a way of covering his blushes – early versions of three Dubliners stories appeared there, one of them under the pseudonym ‘Stephen ...”

“... had proved so golden for them over the years. The same inertia is evident with the works of Woolf, Joyce, Hardy and Yeats. With much hoo-hah the world was informed in the late Eighties that the text of Ulysses was a disgrace, and a new perfected text would be introduced to coincide with the termination of copyright (this was the ill-fated Gabler ...”