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BLOOMSDAY ESSAY:It wasn’t just the architecture of Dublin that Joyce immortalised on the pages of ‘ Ulysses’ – many real-life Dublin characters wound up there too. In advance of Bloomsday on June 16th, Bridget Hourican charts a who’s who of characters from the city’s most famous novel

IN THE 1940s, after Joyce’s death, BBC researchers arrived in Dublin to find people to interview for a radio programme. They approached Richard Irvine Best, the recently retired director of the National Library, and a gregarious man, well known on the literary social circuit. He wasn’t gregarious on this occasion: “What makes you think I have any connection with this man, Joyce?” The researchers pointed out that he was, after all, a character in Ulysses.Best drew himself up: “I am not a character in fiction. I am a living being.”