The Dublin Bar has a long tradition of learned counsel who have doubled as scholars of the humanities. At University College Dublin, Frank Callanan completed an undergraduate degree in history before being called to the Bar in 1979 and specialising thereafter in employment law and judicial review. Throughout his legal career, he pursued his vocation as a historian. He first published a groundbreaking book on the fatal split in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in December 1890 after the leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was cited in a famous divorce action. He followed it with another: a savage biography of Tim Healy, the former Parnell ally who became his fiercest critic. While these publications clearly signalled Callanan’s affiliations as a historian, friends remarked that in conversation he was as likely to talk about modernist writers and the Gaelic Revival as he was to dissect the minutiae of Irish politics. Callanan turned next to a project that merged history and literature: a political life of James Joyce. The extracts from his huge work in progress received acclaim from specialists far and wide. 

The projected book was already many hundreds of pages long when Princeton University Press contracted it. Sadly, Callanan did not finish his magnum opus: he died suddenly in 2021 at the age of sixty-five. Four close friends and colleagues – Bridget Hourican, Luca Crispi, Margaret O’Callaghan and Peter Kennealy – have seen his 900-page book into print. In their modest and pleasing introduction, they stress that they had little work to do other than tidying up the textual apparatus. The chapters he wrote were complete. The book as it exists now is largely concerned with Joyce’s life until the First World War, when he left Trieste and published his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Two final chapters provide cameos of Zurich and Ulysses (1922), Paris and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Callanan perfectly situates Joyce at University College Dublin between 1898 and 1902. He draws a detailed picture of how Parnell, who died in 1891, cast a paralysing shadow over Irish parliamentary politics. Joyce’s friends active in politics had to define themselves in relation to this inheritance. Joyce was unwilling to