Word: dermot
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Joining other senior Royal Air Force brass in a submachine-gun target match, Britain's sporting Chief of Air Staff Sir Dermot Boyle sprayed much lead to little avail, wound up 21st in an eagle-eyed field of 22 officers. He took his crushing defeat stoically: "Either I'm a very bad shot or there's a great deal of insubordination in the air force...
...Dermot McNamara plays him as a foolish fellow indeed, pleased but generally unable to cope with the greatness so suddenly thrust upon him. In the process he becomes even more bedraggled and gormless than the natives, and makes it incredible that anyone, much less a bright scornful girl like Pegeen Mike, could call him a lad with "a mighty spirit in him and a gamey heart...
...Dermot O'Neill is the younger son of a proud Duncrana family dedicated to farming and to the twin pieties of Catholicism and Irish history. When the pieties turn out not to be identical twins. Dermot is doomed. It is 1940. and in the farmhouse kitchen the O'Neills happily record Hitler's latest victory over the British. By tradition. England's extremity is Ireland's opportunity, and the Irish Republican Army-after a long time in the doldrums-is "out" again. Its members have the illusion that Hitler's war aims include Irish...
...Good-Matured Devil. Dermot has been a hero in the I.R.A. raids, and marked for promotion, but three things give him second thoughts. He is a "good-natured devil without hate or harm in him," and he has grievously wounded a man. Also he has discovered that his I.R.A. company commandant, the crippled village bicycle mechanic, is a malignant fanatic. Most important, Dermot is a pious lad, and the church has come down like thunder on the I.R.A...
...Dermot's moral dilemma is sharpened by the fact that his commandant has ordered an attack on a police station which may well kill innocents. The writing is no great shakes, but there is nothing slipshod about the moral crux onto which Novelist Roth has carpentered his O'Neill. A Terrible Beauty is a plain tale, honest as a pair of well-cobbled brogans. Unhappily, every now and then Roth remembers that writing about Ireland is supposed to be a bit on the poetic side, and sets up a keen about the scenery or the weather. The only...