John Quinn

The word ‘obscene’, according to the dictionary, refers to anything ‘offensively or grossly indecent, lewd’. By the standards of the day, the Little Review was a borderline obscene, certainly at times salacious, literary journal. For the crime of serialising Ulysses – James Joyce’s then unpublished steamy masterwork – it was made to face obscenity charges. Operating out of Chicago and New York from 1914 to 1929, the journal introduced American readers to such modernist heavyweights as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein. It was not just a platform for bookish shock effects; it altered the course of American literary culture. James Joyce, who relished litigation, dreamed of a trial

‘In 50 years’ time,’ Augustus John gloomily reflected following his sister’s death on 18 September 1939, ‘I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’ He was right. In 2004, when the Tate mounted a joint retrospective of Augustus and Gwen John, it was Gwen who had become the major artist. The ‘variable strident chords’ of the self-styled Gypsy King, likened in his youth to Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael, had been supplanted by the ‘sustained minor key’ of the nunlike recluse.  The first decades of the 20th century were what Virginia Woolf described as ‘the Age of Augustus John’; but the praise lathered on him after his own death,