James Joyce's modernist masterpiece a glorious reminder of Royal Ascot's enduring timelessness

Happy Bloomsday one and all! Friday is the day which celebrates the great modernist novel of the last century, Ulysses, and which serves as an annual reminder not just of the importance of James Joyce's seminal work in the development of literature but also of the exalted, pivotal place of horseracing in early 20th-century society.

As Leopold Bloom traverses Dublin on Thursday, June 16, 1904, a recurring motif is the quest to discover who is going to win the Gold Cup at Ascot that day and whether one 'dark horse' outsider, Bloom, has made a killing by backing another outsider, the 20-1 winner Throwaway. The suspicion of punters who miss out falls on Bloom – "the only man in Dublin has it" because of an innocuous "throw it away" remark as he discards his newspaper.

The Gold Cup already had 100 years of history behind it when Throwaway defeated the favourites, Lord Howard de Walden's Zinfandel and the mighty Sceptre, the only horse ever to capture four Classics, in that Gold Cup of 1904, and it was more than another decade before Joyce put pen to paper to recreate the event in Ulysses, so it had clearly stuck in his mind as the backdrop to a momentous day when he had his first date with future wife Nora Barnacle.