Ulysses

Available for over a year

In this series of The Essay, five leading cultural voices choose a great work of art and talk about a small, under-appreciated aspect of the piece that carries great meaning for them. For this edition, Irish Journalist and literary editor, Fintan O'Toole, draws our attention to a little character in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ who has recently come to haunt him. It is a book he first read when he was 17, and one which teems with almost 200 other named characters. Fintan, however, missed the significance of one apparently minor character until now - a boy called Patsy Dignam who faces a fate that could have been that of his own father when he was growing up in their home city of Dublin. Producer: Emma Betteridge