Word: virginally
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...British Rock Music Entrepreneur Richard Branson, 33, succeed where Freddie Laker failed? The answer began unfolding last week as Branson's new airline, Virgin Atlantic, made its maiden flight from Gatwick Airport near London to Newark Airport near New York City. It carried 465 passengers, most paying a cut-rate $138, about $230 less than current standard transatlantic fares. The price will rise to $167 on July 1. An ultra-plush first-class service is also available at $1,400, about the same that other carriers charge for first class...
...reclining on the New York Times bestseller list. Some of these smash hits were forgettable even then, but Vidal's remarks about them were sensible and funny enough to survive. He looked askance at the woman who had given her account of the courtship of Joseph and the Virgin Mary: "It is difficult to know what, if anything, she had in mind when she decided to tell the Age-Old Story with nothing new to add." He deplored Trevanian's habit, in The Eiger Sanction, of hauling such celebrities as the Burtons and Jackie Onassis into the action...
...mind to mind with no perceptible voice to bridge the gaps. All that floating free sometimes can give readers mental seasickness. To avoid this, most authors use plot for ballast. The plot structures the thoughts, the thoughts give added resonance to the "real events." In A.N. Wilson's Wise Virgin, however, the balance breaks down, and plot and ideas end up in a predictable and boring...
...Wise Virgin's plot is about the balance between promiscuity and monasticism, and between innocence and cynicism. Witness the title: to modern lascivious ears, "wise virgin" sounds like an innocent losing here naivete. But in the "Treatise of Heavenly Love," the pet project of a medievalist named Giles Fox, the phrase refers to the Gospel parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Those who have "kept burning that holy light of virginity in their lamps can present themselves spotless to their Lord and Lover," says the thirteenth-century sermon, but their concupiscent comrades will be damned by their "fleshly lusts...
...clever characters in the book do not seem to balance with Giles' weighty gloom. It is hard to see the world, so to speak, through a blind man's eyes, and hard to make funny stories with happy endings out of morose ideas. Wise Virgin's cleverness just cannot buoy up its hero's dead weight...