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But is Joyce a great writer? Connolly is not sure. To begin with, 'he asks too much of his ideal reader.' 'Am I the only person,' Connolly wonders, who finds 'the plans and keys and clues and commentaries on Joyce's books more exhilarating than the originals?'

He was no longer a Christian himself; but he converted the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a superior kind of human folly and one which, interpreted by a secular artist, contained obscured bits of truth.

Wit can be a way of seeing the world. Johnson describes it as an 'unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other.'

Many of the facts Ellmann collected for James Joyce are mundane or commonplace, the sort most biographers omit. 'Don't you think the way a genius ties his tie is important?' he once asked the Irish filmmaker Sean O'Mordha.

Yeats is always looking to further and to celebrate an aristocracy of culture, while Joyce, who depends more than Yeats upon such an aristocracy to read him, declines to endorse it, and in his work is concerned only with people who, he said, make less than a thousand pounds a year.

I do not think the business of education is to entertain students, or to make them feel good ... if inadvertently in the course of being instructed they should feel good, so much the better.

Although she and her sister Katty corresponded 'continuously' (Lucy Ellmann's word), sometime in the 1980s Katty, described by Lucy as 'very houseproud,' decided, as Lucy put it, 'to throw out all of my mother's letters - purely for tidying purposes ... My father was beside himself when he heard this, claiming that the whole history of our family was in those letters.'

Agnes describes him as 'middle-aged, paunchy and stupid,' the sort of man who 'overcame indifference or hostility by his slowness to comprehend it.'

At one point he owned a bakery, which failed in part because he gave all the bread away at the end of the day, so that eventually this became the only time customers turned up.

In recounting this anecdote in a later letter to Smith, Ellmann observed that 'the interesting thing about the British upper classes is that they actually act just as their caricaturists say.'

Ellmann writes of meeting two 'prize specimens' of the community at the rabbi's house, one of whom irritated him by claiming to be interested in people rather than culture, 'as if the people were independent of the culture. It's bad enough being uncultivated without attempting to justify it.'

Children like him should be patented and put into every home!

Erwin she describes as 'handicapped by his natural ability which could easily foster idleness.'

Ich weiß von einem Künstler nich genug, wenn ich nur sein geschaffenes Werk vor mir habe, und bekenne mich zu Goethes Wort, dass man die großen Schöpfungen, um sie ganz zu begreifen, nicht nur in ihrer Vollendung gesehen, sondern auch in ihrem Werden belauscht haben muss.

Immer leuchteten Bücher an der Wand, schön gebunden oder in Papier sorgsam eingeschlagen, denn er liebte Bücher wie stumme Tiere.

Aber ich frage mich deshalb auch immer wieder in einer Art heimlicher Sorge: werden auch in unseren Zeiten, in unseren neuen Lebensformen, die den Menschen aus jeder innern Sammlung mörderisch hinausjagen wie ein Waldbrand die Tiere aus ihren verborgensten Verstecken, solche völlig der lyrischen Kunst verschworenen Seelen möglich sein?

Aber doch: in seinem Letzten, seinem Verborgensten erkennt man ein Volk oder eine Stadt nie durch Bücher und selbst nicht durch fleißigstes Flanieren, sondern immer nur durch seine besten Menschen. Einzig aus geistiger Freundschaft mit den Lebenden gewinnt man Einblick in die wirklichen Zusammenhänge zwischen Volk und Land; alles Beobachten von außen bleibt unechtes und voreiliges Bild.

Es gab in dieser Familie keine kleine Kaufleute, keine Makler mehr, sondern nur Bankiers, Direktoren, Professoren, Advokaten and Ärzte, jeder sprach mehrere Sprachen, und ich erinnere mich, mit welcher Selbstverständlichkeit man bei meiner Tante in Paris bei Tisch von der einen zur andern hinüberwechselte.

Dyson (1985: 5) has perceptively noted that in his book, “Schrödinger’s
view of what constitutes a living organism resembles a bacteriophage more than it resembles a bacterium or a fruit-fly”, which in hindsight proved
perfectly appropriate.

It is interesting that many of these pioneers—most notably
Delbrück and his group—used bacteriophage viruses as their experimental system, as these are purely parasitic, crystallizable entities in which the
metabolic function has been lost and only the hereditary function survives.

Let us not forget that ‘Brownian motion’ is named after the botanist Robert Brown, who first reported it in 1827!

Overall, there is something decidedly odd about the habit of molecular biologists to downplay stochasticity, if not to disregard it altogether,
in their representations and explanations.

As Michel Morange (2020: 411) succinctly puts it, “Schrödinger’s position is a direct transposition of the mechanistic and deterministic views of Descartes, expressed in terms of genes and chromosomes”.

The oft-told story is that von Neumann told Shannon to call his uncertainty measure ‘entropy’ because “no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage” (quoted in Tribus and McIrvine 1971: 180).

It is, of course, delightfully ironic that the section of What Is Life? that advocates of nonequilibrium thermodynamics (and many others) have found most illuminating and inspiring is the very same section that Pauling—arguably the greatest chemist of the twentieth century—finds most wrongheaded and infuriating.

The giant workflow consisted of a cascading series of parallel and serial computations and was so ambitious that a methuselah of champagne was used to incentivise the team to manage the sustained and uninterrupted number crunching.

On the Shetland island of Foula around 1850, local inhabitants refused to let a clergyman vaccinator land his boat because of communal rumours that he had come to castrate the men.

In the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Minneapolis crowds insisted on attending football games in the teeth of public health prohibitions, and the St Paul bowling club insisted on resuming meetings at the height of the infection - a case that illuminates the less beneficial side of the social capital generated by twentieth-century American bowling clubs.

'the puzzles, riddles, and unanswered questions and quests for their solutions on which the signature texts of high modernism are so fixated function not only to hone the reader’s intellect but also to call for intelligent work on what Musil calls the soul'

'In the prison of the gifted I was friendly with the guards
So I never had to witness what happens to the heart…'