Myles Before Myles
Flann O'Brien
Language: English
Pages: 286
ISBN: 1843512645
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Myles Before Myles is a wonderfully funny selection of writings from the pen of Brian O'Nolan (aka Flann O'Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, George Knowall). In this fun-filled extravaganza he is, above all, an entertainer, a `gas man.' Flann O'Brien is a cult hero whose comic genius has been praised by James Joyce, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas, and Anthony Burgess. Here is a feast for them all: a book full of the joys of Myles as student, as blatherer, as romancer, as Irishman, as poet. Its reappearance has been well worth waiting for.
persecuted inhabitants of West Cork to face the attentions of fanatic Oleryites with the courage and the hope that scientific knowledge alone can give. Ní beag sin, or xyz. IT GIVES THE PRONUNCIATION AT A GLANCE, it can register dialectic variations and find the Indo-European root of a given word without even the use of Compound Fractions. ALL THAT IS REQUIRED IS A KNOWLEDGE OF ELEMENTARY MATHEMATICS and a reasonable amount of faith in human nature. Let us take a homely example. The word Seadna
quiet evening on board the sludge-shifter at the Pigeon House when they saw Butterley riding their cock albatross on a reconnaissance flight over the Bull Wall. They raised their sharp helliloos and Hibernian ululations to stop the thief, and two Garda Baby Spitfires went up in pursuit. The raider made his escape, but not before his tank was badly punctured, and he was seen making what appeared to be a forced landing in the general direction of the Nose of Howth, with dense clouds of dark smoke
the evening’s business, no matter how much they have won or lost. There are many ‘characters’, ‘cards’, people who are different from others in some mild entertaining way. Yet when the lights go out, the starting bell clangs and the dogs come streaking round the track at forty miles an hour, they are all suddenly reduced by the tension of the spectacle to uniform pin-points of attention. The instant the race is over, they disintegrate into their multiple diversities, all reassuming their
whiskey-addict, there to hide even from each other in dim secret snugs. A pub without a side-door up a lane would have been as well off with no door at all. Up to recent times the only improvement was the bar parlour, a dark privacy at the rear where any respectable bowler-hatted gentleman from the countinghouse of a large drapery concern could tinkle in peace at his hot mid-day whiskey. Such places were clean and comfortable enough, though often equipped with forbidding furniture of the
with casks all around to receive the resounding fist. Fanning’s of Lincoln Place had and has a similar fame. Some of the distinguished guests in Fanning’s, guzzling the uniformly good drink, will tell you that the intransigence of the distinguished boss’s political beliefs can sometimes lend an unwelcome uniformity to his conversation. Today, as in the past, birds of a feather tend to flutter into the same snug. Grogan’s of Leeson Street and Higgins’s of Pembroke Street are noted for the