Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is the most riotous, humane, encyclopaedic, stylistically brilliant and wickedly funny literary work of the twentieth century. And if this verges too much on protest, little argument is needed to maintain at least that no other book stands so preeminently over 20C literature. In 1941, twenty years after its publication, Harry Levin declared Ulysses ‘a novel to end all novels.’  T.S. Eliot hailed the work as a major step toward 'making the modern world possible for art.’ And Virginia Woolf, though not enamoured with the book's ‘indecency’, confessed to having read it ‘with spasms of wonder.’  More widely still, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez all claimed to be beneficiaries of Joyce and Ulysses.