Word: irished
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year is 1798, and in County Mayo, on Ireland's impoverished west coast, an army of the French Revolution has landed to rouse the embittered Irish against their English overlords. Elsewhere in the country, in gibbet-strewn Wexford and in bloodstained Ulster, rebellions have already been crushed. Any remaining hope hinges on the rising in Mayo, and there, in the euphoria of the French landing, the cause catches fire. In centuries hence, the Irish will sing of the glorious Men of the West and the humiliation of the British at Castlebar. This is all history...
...outlaw school, reciting his Gaelic verses in the houses of the rich and pursuing neutral grain spirits and colleens with unflagging energy. Here, in the cool rationality of Moore Hall, is MacCarthy's fellow Catholic and countryman George Moore, historian of the French Revolution and Cassandra of its Irish offspring, dreading that "the spirit of Rousseau is in the very air these days, like dandelion puffballs." Recording the contagion, as one of the novel's several narrators, is the Rev. Arthur Vincent Broome, M.A. (Oxon.), dispatched from England to shepherd a Protestant flock in distant Killala but soon...
...York) who has spent much of his spare time over the past two decades in Ireland. He is an unabashed Mayo chauvinist, and his lyric affection for the land and the people animates his characters. Even the Rev. Mr. Broome drops his scholarly tone to write how Irish music "would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets." Yet the author is too honest a historian to let sympathy alter circumstances. The first taste of revolution is a heady draft, but the dregs of doom...
...Eddie Coyle (1972), still knows how to place surreal descriptions in the dialogue of his characters: "Marian looked like a small horse, perhaps a pony, who had read Vogue and believed it." And he has not lost his conductor's ear for the music and lilt of Boston Irish patois. Here the punch lines are stronger than the plot lines, but Higgins' characters are so shrewdly observed by Year's end, as Edgar confronts Peter, that it is impossible to disagree with his summary: "You're a son of a bitch yourself...
...Jack Haley, 79, jovial Boston-born stage and screen comedian best remembered as the Tin Woodman, Judy Garland's fellow pilgrim on the yellow brick road in the 1939 MGM film classic The Wizard of Oz; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. Haley parlayed his blue-eyed Irish good looks, comic flair ("Trouble is my best material") and talent for song and dance routines into a lucrative career that allowed him to all but retire after World War II as a millionaire real estate investor. Last appearance: in Norwood, a 1970 movie directed by his son Jack Haley...