In 1968, Conn Curran summed up his life-long companionship with Joyce, including the 1904 photograph he took of his friend in his family's back garden. With this re-issue of Curran's book, another group of University College Dubliners takes a new look at his work, delving into the Curran-Laird collection at the James Joyce Library.

Side by side with Joyce, Curran, arts critic, and Helen Laird Curran, his activist partner, come into clearer view; writer-critic adventurers Padraic and Mary Maguire Colum return again; savant Paul Leon, in Paris, takes his place too. The literary, cultural, and political context widens: the Irish wars, erupting again in 1922 as Ulysses begins circulating; the Paris-Dublin rescue operation of this group's papers at Joyce's death, suspended – and accomplished – in this time of violence.

The 2022 collective edition offers an uncommon picture of this inventive and committed cohort, their work, and their worlds.

With essays by Hugh Campbell, Diarmaid Ferriter, Anne Fogarty, Margaret Kelleher and Helen Solterer. The UCD Curran-Laird collection presented by Eugene Roche and Evelyn Flanagan.