Summer reading is a byword for light escapism – but it can mean anything, from catching up on the classics to a new romance novel. Julian Novitz travels to the 19th century to trace its evolution.
Ulysses is often written off as inaccessible but the epic is much more readable than most assume.
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Around the world today, fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses will celebrate Bloomsday. This experimental novel can be bewildering to read, but for those who persist, it is a ‘feast’ of a book.
The great Irish novelist saw himself as European first, Irish second. There’s a lesson in that for the UK.
Many literary questions about smell are quite philosophical. Why do humans get pleasure from perfumes? Do rich bodies smell differently from poor ones?
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Smell is the Cinderella of the senses in Anglophone literature, but James Joyce wrote an olfactory revolution. His treatment of the science of smell was astonishingly prescient.