Thanks for posting that passage, Captain G - I couldn't agree with you more in your assessment of it. The few light taps the snow makes on the windowpane, which echo the gravel Michael Furey threw against Gretta's window all those years ago, the journey westward - it's writing at its best.

Joyce's criticisms of Ireland are well known here, and they certainly earned him no friends at the time, at least in certain circles. But great art transcends the artist who created it, and I think people can distinguish between the two. And those sorts of injustices occurred everywhere, not just Dublin. Read Dickens on the underbelly of London, for instance. It's never Under Milk Wood -