Birmingham has unearthed every last detail about the novel’s tribulations, but his argument is tendentious and short-sighted. He wants to portray the modernist “battle” against obscenity laws as consistent not just with its author’s lifelong desire to create mischief—“Joyce’s record of foul language began when he was seven years old”—but with the anti-establishment mood of the early twentieth century. If sentimental misconceptions about literature’s subtlety and discreteness lie at one extreme of commentary on censorship, then sentimental misconceptions about its crusading power, its evergreen friendship with progressive causes, lie at the other extreme.

“For modernist writers,” Birmingham writes, “literature was a battle against an obsolete civilisation. ... Censorship was the tyranny of established cultural standards.” Knowledge of the book’s reception is read back into its author’s intentions, almost as if Joyce wrote the book in order to expose the stupidity of obscenity law. But as Birmingham knows, Joyce’s target, the one he waged war against with “what I write and say and do,” was the Catholic Church—hardly dominant in the countries where Ulysses was prosecuted. Birmingham’s Joyce—Joyce the foul-mouthed libertine—can never be truly free because he is so much a slave to his disobedience, his refusal to “yield to the demands of bourgeois governments and markets.” There is a difference between breaking rules and living for nothing else, and Birmingham, in presenting the fate of Ulysses as the most significant thing about it, has clouded the distinction.

Everything is seen through the lens of obscenity law. Birmingham ascribes F. R. Leavis’s isolation at Cambridge to his decision to assign Ulysses as a text for study. As shown by his impatience with the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—and his refusal to testify for the defense—Leavis cared nothing about freedom as an end in itself. He wanted to teach Ulysses because he thought it was relevant to a course he was teaching, rather than as a way of giving the finger to Cambridge or the government.

Birmingham says that “decades later” people were still saying, “We don’t like the books he gives undergraduates,” yet Leavis, in the article Birmingham quotes, recalled remarks like that “at the time of Lawrence’s death” in 1930—four years after Leavis had entered the Galloway & Porter bookshop to request a copy of Ulysses. In the subsequent decades, Leavis did plenty to irritate his colleagues. (Ironically, the central proof of his lack of favour was that he was never made professor, a title Birmingham gives him more than once.) A reference to Nab­okov is similarly skewed: “Lolita ... would not have been possible without Ulysses. ‘Oh, yes,’ Nabokov said, ‘let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game.’” In context, and even out of it, this remark has nothing whatsoever to do with obscenity; coming as it does at the end of Birmingham’s book, it reminds you of all the ways in which, by adopting the polar opposite of Kermode’s stance, he has short-changed his subject and understated Joyce’s literary importance.

Ulysses and Doctor Zhivago belong to the same volatile era, when a book could be punished for threatening or celebrating bourgeois ideals. That era came to an end in the 1980s. Glasnost fulfilled what Khrushchev’s “thaw”—the period in which Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of Russia—had only promised; Pasternak’s novel became formally available to the Russian public in 1988 when Novy Mir, the literary journal, began publishing excerpts, and Izvestia began serialising Ulysses, legally available in England and America since the mid-1930s, in Russian translation the following year. Attention in the west shifted from obscene publications to visual pornography. Novels on erotic and homosexual themes were published without reprisal. But then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for insulting Allah in The Satanic Verses, starting a familiar but subtly distinctive argument and raising the curtain on yet another “battle.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall, welcomed by the right as “the end of history,” with democracy as the outright and eternal victor, ought to have made things easier for the left, cutting Marxism-Leninism off from actually existing totalitarianism. With crimes no longer being committed in his name—at least not in Europe—Marx could once again become the author of numerous articles in defence of free expression, which Stalinists had preferred to dismiss as products of the young Marx, still gulled by “humanism.”

Instead, the situation became newly complicated. The cold war had produced an Anglo-American backlash not of cultural neutralism and retreat from politics, but of wholesale politicization, with particular emphasis on feminist, post-colonial and Marxist readings; beyond the academy, a similar process of revisionism and wrong-righting was at work in political correctness. As Brian Winston points out in his thoughtful new book, The Rushdie Fatwa and After: A Lesson to the Circumspect, liberal acceptance of alien belief systems hobbled liberalism’s “ability to deal with any root-and-branch rejections of its values.” Cultural relativism/political correctness found it as hard to defend Rushdie against the charge of hurting Muslim feelings as it did to condemn Khomeini’s fatwa—or, as it became when the ayatollah died in June 1989, hukm (a fatwa dies with its issuer).

Winston’s book is helped by the public nature of the Rushdie affair. Birmingham, a literary historian eager to emphasise the importance of the Ulysses trials, thanks “countless” librarians; Finn and Couvée, respectively a reporter and a translator, found material for a non-fiction thriller (they describe the CIA book-smuggling programme as a “caper”). But there is nothing clandestine, nothing cloak-and-dagger, about a fatwa. The facts have been amply documented, most recently by Rushdie himself in his strange and unappealing memoir Joseph Anton. Winston is therefore free, having cantered quickly through the logistics, to consider the ironies and contradictions, and to offer “a lesson.”

He is also helped by the clarity of the charges made against Rushdie. Unlike obscenity or political subversion, blasphemy is seen as an end in itself. Ayatollah Khomeini, in ordering Muslims to punish Rushdie, made no reference to a knock-on effect. The reply, often enough heard, that the fatwa turned literature into agitprop is not strictly accurate. Rushdie wasn’t accused of saying “be a skeptic,” but was said to have shown disrespect to Allah, which by most definitions he did.

The relevant reply is not that literature doesn’t incite, implore, proselytise, recommend, disrespect, but that it can incite, implore, proselytise, recommend, disrespect whatever it pleases. To the peculiar emphasis on Rushdie as a “fictionist”—the word used by Christopher Hitchens, his shrewdest supporter—Winston calmly points out: “Claiming such writing as fiction is pointless because what is fiction, in any case, but lies? ... Fiction, like drunkenness in a case of dangerous driving, exacerbates the offence.”

Another thing that distinguishes Winston’s book is the live reality, the continuing urgency and pathos, of the conflict he describes—his “after” isn’t over. Birmingham recounts the Ulysses scandal as a piece of Whig history; there’s a happy-ever-after tone to his claim that “you do not worry about your words being banned partly because of what happened to Ulysses.” Finn and Couvée end their book by quoting the description by David Remnick, a Moscow correspondent during perestroika, of ordinary Russian men and women on the Metro, reading their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir. When Pasternak had died in 1960, Kermode referred to the “reinstatement which will follow at some convenient time in the future”; and here it was, less than 30 years later. But it is difficult to show such confidence about the day when the people of Tehran will be permitted to read The Satanic Verses or the “more objectionable passages” (still banned) of Ulysses; to follow or ignore the guidance they may or may not be offering.