In memoriam

Today marks the deaths of two authors intimately connected to Ireland: Joyce and Spenser. What links them, I suppose, is their hatred of the place, though Joyce's relationship to Ireland was of course much more complex. Spenser went there as a murdering imperialist, then propagandised his and others' activities as the beginning of the British Empire. Joyce's best work is a love song to urban, shiftless, modern Ireland, even though the dominant anti-intellectual, illiberal, backwoods strand of Irish culture ensured that he soon went into exile to create an Ireland of the mind.