om’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. But, as Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, the novel is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss Joyce’s deliberate and accidental mistakes, Trieste’s essential influence on the novel, and why a queer reading of Ulysses really does hold water.

Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/factcheckingjoyce

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1d:T4a1,James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this extended extra from ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Adam Thirlwell look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality. ‘Fiction and the Fantastic

Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’