1. We get a first hint that the whole book is going to be a defiance of the Self when, in its opening paragraph, Buck Mulligan holds up his shaving bowl in a parody of the Latin Mass and intones ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’ (‘I am about to enter before the altar of God’). One puzzle raised by the novel is why Joyce should have been attracted to creating a modern rival to a story of which he seems to have had so little understanding. In Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, he cites him asking why was he ‘always returning to this theme?’ Joyce’s answer: ‘I find the subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature. Ulysses didn’t want to go off to Troy; he knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Hellas, was only a pretext for the Greek merchants, who were seeking new markets ....’ This is bizarre. The ‘official’ reason for the war was the one described by Homer, that Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, had run off with Paris, the son of the Trojan king Priam. Since there is no historical evidence that the Trojan War ever took place, it seems perverse to explain it through a kind of parody of sub-Marxist revisionism. One may well argue that the story of Odysseus is ‘the most human in world literature’: but not, it seems, for any reason discerned by Joyce, which may further explain why the two stories are so polarically opposed in every way.

2. It was this episode which later prompted John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, in a famous article in Encounter, to claim that Lawrence had intended to show Mellors entering Constance by an act of buggery. As a homosexual Sparrow would not have realised that a man and a woman can quite naturally enjoy intercourse in the fashion Lawrence described.

3. This echoed the defence once offered by Ian Fleming to the charge that his James Bond novels were ‘pornographic’: ‘Sex was a perfectly reasonable subject as far as Shakespeare was concerned, and I don’t really see why it shouldn’t be as far as I’m concerned.’

4. Author’s note to the published edition of Saved (Methuen, London, 1966). A surprising feature of the play in retrospect might be how comparatively mild was its language. It was a tribute to the force of the taboo on ‘four-letter words’ that, despite the Lady Chatterley case five years earlier, the use of such words in public was still at this stage remarkably rare. Indeed another symptom of the hysterical mood of those weeks in the autumn of 1965 was that, only 10 days after the premiere of Saved, this taboo was ostentatiously challenged in a carefully set-up BBC television interview with Kenneth Tynan, the leading ‘progressive’ critic, now literary manager of the National Theatre. Tynan was asked whether he would allow a play to be staged at the National in which ‘sexual intercourse took place on the stage?’. This allowed him to give the strangely inconsequential reply ‘I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word “fuck” would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything that can be printed or said can also be seen.’ In a sense it was the highpoint of Tynan’s career. The coup succeeded in its aim of creating a public sensation. The BBC switchboard was jammed with protests. Tynan’s fellow-progressives, led by Dr Jonathan Miller and George Melly, rushed publicly to congratulate him. He later compounded his inconsequentiality by claiming that he had only been ‘quoting from the evidence in the Lady Chatterley trial’. Only over the next 15–20 years did the use of four-letter words on stage and screen become general. Had Bond written his play later, its dialogue would doubtless have contained little else.

5. In 1968 the critic Ken Tynan was to launch a campaign to promote the joys of masturbation and to make it ‘respectable’. In storytelling this obsession was to reach its most publicised expression in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), about a mother-dominated New York Jewish boy who manages to have sexual relations with a number of girls, all non-Jewish, but finds his greatest pleasure in endless, compulsive masturbation. Eventually he goes to Israel where he has an affair with a Jewish girl, whom it would be socially acceptable for him to marry. But his obsession with solitary sex wins out and he returns to mother.

6. One of the more conspicuous features of avant-garde storytelling in the early 1960s was the collapse of plot and structure. Films like L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961), directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, or L’Avventura (1960) and L’Eclisse (1962) by Michelangelo Antonioni were dreamlike in their deliberate inconsequentiality. Last Year In Marienbad, shot in an imposing chateau with formal gardens, centred on a beautiful woman (‘A’) meeting a handsome stranger (X’), who tries to convince her that they had met before, possibly at some resort hotel, possibly in Marienbad, where she may have promised to run away with him. ‘A’ claims not to remember their meeting, but it is never made clear whether they actually met or not. The key to the film’s tantalising power was that it was a nyktomorph. Precisely because it teased its audience by not providing enough information for them to make sense of what was happening, the story, as in a dream, conjured up a sense of some elusive significance which could not be fully grasped. A writer whose work reflected this disintegration rather more simplistically was William Burroughs, an American homosexual and heroin addict, who, after writing a pornographic novel The Naked Lunch, went on to experiment with stories in which the sentences were designed to be randomly jumbled up and read in any sequence.

7. In the novel by Anthony Burgess from which Kubrick’s film-version was adapted, the effects of the aversion therapy do not wear off, so that Alex remains transformed. Burgess was so angry at Kubrick’s rewriting of the story’s ending that he withdrew his support from the film version.