Patrick Geoghegan
speaker
1,107 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Aug
Patrick Geoghegan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
I am not going to begin with Joyce, or certainly not directly.
I'm going to begin with Homer and the Odyssey and the character of Odysseus because Christopher Nolan's film is the film of the year and certainly of the summer.
And Odysseus features in the book because Joyce was hugely influenced by him.
And Frank writes about how the First World War, the Great War,
fundamentally changed how Joyce understood the character of Odysseus.
Tell me about Joyce's politics.
Frank calls it a strategy of silence.
There is a wonderful discussion of the dinner scene in Portrait of an Artist.
And I think scholars tended to see that as something autobiographical from from Joyce's life, but Frank actually shows how it's not autobiographical, it's something deliberately reconstructed, perhaps from the newspapers, to to reconstruct the political atmosphere of the Parnell split.
Now, sadly Frank passed away before the book was completed, but did such extraordinary work on it over a twenty five year period.
And he was on the show many times, a brilliant barrister, a brilliant historian, a brilliant Joycean.
What was it like working on the book with those collaborators you mentioned and, you know, checking the footnotes?
Uh you mentioned how there was almost no editing needed.
He he spots Griffith's potential, but he also seems to be remarkably prescient about how twentieth century Ireland is going to develop.
He definitely seems to have a a sense of the role and the growing influence of the Catholic Church and has a definite sense of what's going to happen and the trends in the years ahead.
And Joyce refused to do what people expected of him.
So he refused to write in the political language that that many in Ireland expected of him, that he didn't conform to uh their view of nationalism and uh uh and and approach politics in the way that they wanted Irish writers to approach it.
He'll find his own way through.
Well, a book is called James Joyce A Political Life.
It's published in Hardback by Princeton University Press, a wonderful look at the politics of Joyce, the author Frank Hannon, and we'll be back with more talking history on News Talk right after this.
Showing 41–60 of 1,107 · page 3 of 56
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