The book is essentially a biography of Arthur Griffith. It is set in the cultural and national milieu of the Irish renaissance 19th-20th centuries. Griffith became a newspaper editor in South Africa just before the Boer War. He returned to Ireland to edit the United Irishman and latterly Sinn Fein & Nationality. He gathered around him literary people like WB Yeats, James Joyce, George Russell. He was the first person to introduce the young James Joyce to the Irish people and had a hug influence on his development. [1901]. He wrote that Ireland should model itself on Hungary. He founded the nationalistic organisation Sinn Fein in 1905. Joyce believed that he joyce had created the template to free the Irish people spiritually in Ulysses [1922] while at the same time Griffith became President of the new Irish Parliament in Dublin Dail Eireann and was en route to free the Irish people economically and politically. For that reason Griffith features throughout Ulysses. Griffith signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 and the Irish Free State came into being. He died prematurely in August 1922.