It has been said of James Joyce by his admirers that he produced nothing but masterpieces. Certainly he had genius: the arrogant genius of a kind, witty man who drank rather too much while sponging mercilessly off his friends; whose physical suffering and troubled life tore from him the greatest autobiographical novels of the century; and whose chief obsession was the source and inspiration of his masterly writing on women. But, as Stan Gebler Davies shows, he was not quite the plaster saint both he and his followers would sometimes wish him to appear.

          Ulysses mad Joyce famous overnight, but not tich (in spite of all those smuggled copies, in the days when the censor was still energetic). His own Odyssey through the years of his life was strewn with various crises – physical, familial, artistic and, above all, financial. Seventeen of those years were devoted to the composition of Finnegans Wake, that apotheosis of the crossword puzzle whichm despite its eminence as the bible of the ageing avant-garde, the author considers (unlike many Joyce idolaters) to have been altogether too long to spend on an elaborate joke.

          This sympathetic and accurate picture of the life and times of James Joyce is the first full-length biography since 1959 – since when many of Joyce’s friends have felt able to speak more freely about his life. That life began, in circumstances of genteel but accelerated poverty, in Dublin in 1882, and ended painfully in Zurich in 1941. The years between indisputably belonged to the greatest novelist of our age.