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Wonderful. A work of incredibly comprehensive scholarship that reads like great fiction. The setting(early twentieth century Europe/U.S.) is one which I was largely unfamiliar with and struck me as a kind of proto-punk scene, with suffragettes, anarchists and artists frequenting(literally) underground nightclubs, publishing their ideas in small DIY magazines and getting arrested for disorderly behaviour. The plot is enthralling(thrilling even, especially the clandestine operations of the ‘bookleggers’) with twists and turns abounding(I had the unique experience of audibly gasping at a publishing error, monumental though it was). But, above all, it’s the characters that stand out.

The Most Dangerous Book is as much about an amazing novel as it is about the amazing people(mostly women) who ensured it could be written, and read by everyone. There was the radical suffragette Dora Marsden who was imprisoned multiple times for acts of political violence(during one of which - after hunger striking, breaking cell windows and protesting naked - it was found that, at 4 foot 10, she was too small to be held by a straitjacket) and founded one of the first great magazines for modernist art with Ezra Pound; Pound himself who, say what you will about his later politics(and - HO BOY - the less said the better), was a great friend to Joyce and other modernist artists in both personal and professional capacities; John Quinn, the high profile New York lawyer/owner of the largest collection of modern European paintings in the world in the 1920s/repugnant sexist/racist who defended Ulysses in numerous obscenity trials; Sylvia Beach, who started one of the best bookshops/literary haunts in the world, and offered to publish the first edition of the book(in spite of the enormous legal risks and practical difficulties) when nobody else would; the enigmatic Harriet Weaver Shaw - perhaps my favourite of the lot - who was a quiet, unassuming heiress devoted to publishing radical art and ideas, and who patronised Joyce to the tune of what would be over a million pounds in today’s money; the well-drawn doubles of Samuel Roth and Bennett Cerf(the former a book pirate with multiple convictions/devoted family man; the latter a hugely successful legitimate publisher/serial adulterer); long suffering Nora Barnacle, one of modern literature’s greatest muses, who tirelessly stood by her infuriatingly impractical, chronically drunk, monomaniacal artist partner and nursed him through years of devastating illness.

And then there’s the man himself(I never got tired of Nora addressing her partner as ‘the writer James Joyce’ - I’m glad to see that even geniuses aren’t immune to their exasperated better-halves taking the piss out of them). Whether you love or hate(or both) Ulysses as a work of art, I’m sure anyone who has read it won’t take much convincing that it is the work of a staggeringly intelligent and unique mind. However, what I think The Most Dangerous Book illuminates best is the unbelievably debilitating physical pain that Joyce suffered during the writing of the novel and throughout the rest of his life. Perhaps it explains a lot about the novel itself, but it’s remarkable that he was able to do anything at all let alone compose a minutely intricate and complex epic while suffering(amongst others): unpredictable bouts of iritis(inflammation of the iris) so painful they could cause him to pass out in the street; an ongoing series of incredibly painful and traumatic unanaesthetised eye operations; teeth so bad that when they were finally treated, seventeen(!) were removed along with seven abcesses and a cyst.

Ulysses certainly isn’t a book for everyone(and I'm definitely not an advocate of pressuring people into reading things they don't enjoy), but I think you could hold up The Most Dangerous Book to those that have skimmed a few pages before joining the ‘Life’s Too Short' Club and suggest that sometimes perseverance can bring great reward.