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“... Joyce left me worrying about two questions.* Did her subject warrant 526 pages? And was the great Richard Ellmann, along with other scholars, guilty of gross invasion of privacy when he published James Joyce’s coprophiliac letters to Nora? Both these questions are of personal significance for me. Last year I published 738 pages about Victor Gollancz ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s Life of Joyce, generally regarded as the best literary biography of our time, was the work of his middle years. The last third of his own life was largely given to this biography of Wilde, which was in some ways a very different sort of undertaking. There were surviving acquaintances of Joyce, but nobody who knew Wilde is available for questioning; the material, though copious, must be sought in libraries ...”

“... where Stephen says: ‘Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.’ Richard Ellmann virtually solved it in Ulysses on the Liffey (1972) with his chapter called ‘The Riddle of Scylla and Charybdis’, which argues that ‘the answer to the sphinx’s riddle was man, the answer to Scylla-Charybdis’s is the act of ...”

“... Belgrave Square, Rathmines – or in the back kitchen of some much more modest establishment. As Richard Ellmann emphasised in his biography, Joyce employed his father till the very end, requiring the particulars of the ‘Star of the Sea’ church when Pappie was at death’s door. In his last remembered words the old man replied to another of his ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers ...”

“... flesh.’ It was a large element in Joyce’s art thus to blend Defoe and Blake. (See page 329 of Ellmann’s incomparable if, one must always watch for it, slightly uncritical biography.) It was the way, too, of another Irish poet whom Joyce could respect, James Clarence Mangan, ‘taking into the vital centre of his life “the life that surrounds ...”

“... one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad moment outside Swan and Edgar’s. Richard Ellmann’s biography says that, as Wilde caught sight of ‘the painted boys on the pavement’ outside the department store, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. Holland traces the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who ...”

“... he was courting new friends, including Maud Gonne, and writing a few reviews. According to Richard Ellmann, William too was offered a job at this time, but turned it down because it was on a Unionist newspaper. Jack was at art college. At the end of that year, Lily took a job with William Morris’s daughter, May, who taught her to embroider the ...”

“... their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max understood Oscar Wilde a good deal ...”

“... It is useful to be able to see this essay again in the company of Eliot, Tate and, above all, Richard Ellmann, whose 1954 elucidation of A Vision restored a balance to the discussion of Yeats’s ideas which the pseudo-Augustan iconoclasm of Yvor Winters was not sufficient to upset. Elizabeth Cullingford’s selection of essays on the poems of ...”

“... than a ham actor and a man called Darling to put an end to the influence of a writer whose wit, as Richard Ellmann has said, was itself ‘an agent of renewal’. As for the Black Book, Spencer’s mysterious compendium of licentiousness remains the MacGuffin of Wilde’s Last Stand, the existence of which, as Hitchcock would explain to Truffaut, is ...”

“... career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton ...”

“... the felicities of style, the ironic detachment and sheer pleasure of reading, provided by, say, Richard Ellmann in his works on Joyce and Wilde. Here it is Lorca’s words alone that vibrate on the page. Despite all his biographer’s efforts, the private man remains an absent presence. A fine pianist, collector (and passionate singer) of folk ...”

“... 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 hate, beyond vanity and remorse, beyond human possibility almost, is his extravagant desire.’ Picasso, in ...”

“... homoeroticism and Christianity. Yeats is using that metaphor of the hunted animal which Richard Ellmann has shown to be a traditional image that was ‘applied to Parnell in his last phase’ and adopted by both Yeats and Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce designs an analogy between Parnell and ‘our saviour’, while the aesthetic identification with ...”