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On a late August afternoon my friend John Hill drove me across the city of Zurich, climbing the suburban heights until we stopped at the gates of Fluntern Cemetery. We walked up the last incline to where, among the trees and billard-table lawns, we saw the Joyces’ grave. There was no mistaking it. Just above the grave is the Giacometti-like sculpture of the writer himself, the work of American artist Milton Hebald. There James Joyce sits, in characteristic pose, deep in conversation, head tilted, one leg resting on the other knee, cigarette poised, his slim cane delicately balanced. Someone once remarked that he held his cane like a musical instrument.

The final chapter in the history of Shakespeare and Company, the famous Paris bookshop, began with the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in May 1939. The shop closed in December 1941 when a Nazi officer saw a copy of Joyce’s book in its window and asked to buy it. Sylvia Beach refused saying it was her only copy, and was not for sale. The officer threatened to return and confiscate her entire stock, and left. He returned the next day and demanded she sold him the book. Again Sylvia refused, and the officer, ‘trembling with rage’ warned that he would be back that afternoon and seize all her books.

There has never been a concentration of outstanding literary and artistic talent such as that in the Paris of the 1920s. The city heaved with outrage and ecstasy at the paintings of Piccaso, and Henri Matisse, the music of Igor Stravinsky, and the wild dancing of Joséphine Baker at the Folies Bergere, and the most extraordinary avant-garde literature, where new boundaries were created by a wave of modernist writers, the most celebrated being James Joyce.

Returning to Paris after an unsuccessful and troublesome visit to Galway in April 1922, Nora and her two children, Georgio (17) and Lucia (15) became aware that fame had come to the Joyces. Three months after its publication, Ulysses was recognised as a work of genius.

MENTION NORA Barnacle and four things come to mind: she was from Galway; she was sexually adventurous and advanced for her day; she was the partner and muse of James Joyce; and she never read a word he wrote.

Back in Connemara for Christmas, which she insisted on calling Christ Mass, Ethel Mannin opens the door of her little cottage, located between Roundstone and Clifden, close to Mannin Bay. She has been away for some time. She lights fires in all three rooms, to drive away the musty smell and damp, and soon she is comfortable sitting by the window looking out at the sea, the mountains beyond. She was back to stay until restlessness, or some political challenge, calls her away again.

The Joyces finally arrived in Zurich on 17 December 1940 exhausted after weeks of torturous negotiations with the German, Vichy-French and Swiss authorities. They had sought refuge in Switzerland during World War I, now they hoped to do so again. To add to the stress of it all they had to leave their daughter Lucia behind in a psychiatric hospital in Brittany which was behind German lines. Joyce hoped that once settled in Zurich he could use all the influence he could muster to have her follow them to safety.

Nora’s last visit to Galway in April 1922 did not go well. Galway, as well as the country, was caught up in a deadly Civil War. The anti -Treaty forces had occupied the Connaught Rangers’ Barracks, Renmore, while the pro- Treaty forces occupied the Great Southern Hotel. The Galway to Dublin train was regularly fired upon from the barracks. There were sporadic gun fights around the Custom House, and the Masonic hall, as both sides struggled for possession. It was a dangerous time and people were fearful.

‘Well what do you have to say to Jim now after all our little squabbles he could not live without me for a month can you imagine my joy when I received a telegram from London a week after Jim and georgie on their way’…….wrote Nora in her unpunctuated flow of words, to her partner’s sister Eileen from her mother’s home in Bowling Green, in July 1912.