bisson

Terry Bisson's GREETINGS & OTHER STORIES (1892391244, $24.95) selects ten satiric short stories to represent the best of Bisson's explorations into other times and worlds.

Marc Bisson, the clinic director, insisted that the health centre's refusal to treat her was a matter of policy, not discrimination.

A private member's bill designed to cut First Nations in on the profits being reaped from the harvest of resources within their territories is stalled in committee because the Ontario provincial government doesn't want to see it pass, claims Gilles Bisson.

Gary and Martin Kemp as The Krays; Amanda Barrie, right, in Carry On Cleo; Corrie's Chris Bisson, left, in East Is East

BLM Alaska State Director Henri Bisson says, "We can safely explore [the northeast] without significant impact to sensitive wildlife." Last March, however, the National Research Council concluded a two-year study of oil and gas activities on Alaska's north slope that suggests the opposite.

Best I'm A Celebrity prices last night (B= Bet365, BS=Blue Sq, L=Ladbrokes): 2 P Tufnell (BS), 5 A Worrall Thompson (BS,L), 11-2 L Barker (BS), 8 T Wilcox (BS), 10 C Bisson (L), 12 S Lloyd (B,BS,L), 14 W Sleep (B), 16 D Westbrook (L), C Guirado (B), J Fashanu (L).

Other contestants include former footballer John Fashanu, ex-soap actors Chris Bisson and Danniella Westbrook, dancer Wayne Sleep and TV weathergirl Sian Lloyd.

Bookies' favourite, former cricketer Phil Tufnell, was leaving Heathrow for Queensland alongside ex-Wimbledon footballer and TV presenter John Fashanu, chef Anthony Worrall Thompson, weather forecaster Sian Lloyd, TV decorator Linda Barker, former punk rocker Toyah Willcox, former Coronation Street actor Chris Bisson, dancer Wayne Sleep and model Catalina Guirado.

Standouts in a consistently fine collection include the travails of a werewolf wife aging in dog years in Susan Palwick's "Gestella," Cory Doctorow's vicious satire of corporate warfare and its victim-soldiers in "Power Punctuation," and the heart-stopping black comedy of Terry Bisson's "The Old Rugged Cross," in which a death row inmate's religious conversion is capitalized on by virtually everyone who comes in contact with him.

Instead, what Lillian Bisson endeavors to do is to put Chaucer's thought into perspective, to get some idea of why he wrote what he did, and to find the intellectual and popular precursors to his writing.

Bisson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Bisson, a shrewd analyst of the "politicization" of power after 1200, seeks the origins of the accountability of the thirteenth century in two hundred years' experience of "bad lordship": since 1000, the latter's agents had-been multiplying their exactions.