Trieste was James Joyce's first port of call in his long, grim, haphazard exile. There is a very strong argument that he was more "at home" there than anywhere else in the protracted odyssey. Full justice had not been done to this period of his life in the biographies, and John McCourt's admirable, balanced, free-thinking study has done a great deal to remedy this.

Quite as much as the facts uncovered, the freshness and clarity of the author's commentary are consistently impressive: he thinks for himself (a rarer quality in this field than one would wish) and his writing, unfaddish and unbiased, is deeply responsive to the predicaments and complicated personality of this extraordinary "acheseyeld from ailing".