Word: blarneyer
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...string of novels that began in 1956 with The Straight and Narrow Path, Honor Tracy has made a particular corner of Ireland her own. It might be called County Farce. It lies just this side of the Dire Straits, along the border of Blarney. It is peopled with grotesques, inanimate as well as animate: crumbling mansions where the plumbing has a will-but not a constitution -of iron; a Hereford bull that for reasons of its own sits down in a kitchen, blockading the stove; an alcoholic postman who carelessly stuffs mail into a tree stump, then thinks to bring...
...Irishman raised in India, Lawrence Durrell is a kind of blarney artist in swami's turban. In The Alexandria Quartet, the illusions were so masterly as to seem substance enough. In Tune, Durrell's 1968 novel, and now in its sequel, Nunquam, Durrell's virtuosity has slipped sufficiently to leave him exposed as a bit of a trickster. His hand is no longer quicker than the reader's eye, and many critics have clobbered...
...play was produced four years before Pinter's. The brothers make passes at Michael's wife and even suggest using his home as a whorehouse. Michael is faced down, raged at and humiliated by his father, who is a perfect blend of aging bull and undiminished blarney. Michael's wife urges him to stand up for his rights. But he is paralyzed by a nagging sense of masculine inadequacy...
Stuff and nonsense, or sheer blarney. For Moynahan, though he is currently disguised as an English professor at Rutgers, is really one of those nonstop Irish-American storytellers, the kind that hold Boston barrooms at bay with: "Wait! Wait, boys! And then there's the one about...
Irony is the first resort of the oporessed. Operating out of two languages, Gaelic and English, the lads found they could shoot up a smoke screen of Irish bulls and blarney that no colonial officer could penetrate. Forbidden to write patriotic songs, they wrote love poems to a girl that sounded suspiciously like Eire, hate poems couched as hymns and generally got things so snarled up that they even have to watch each other. (The best Irish talkers have eyes like terriers'.) Gulliver's Travels, the Anglo-Irish classic, is the high point of the two traditions...