Virginia Woolf in her diary for August 1922 noted of the just-published Ulysses by James Joyce:
“I should be reading Ulysses and fabricating my case for & against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested by the first two or three chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom [TS Eliot], thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later.”
In Paris in February 1929 the critic Cyril Connolly attended the premiere of Un Chien Andalou, the silent surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí: