shop-soiled

It was an ideal that he painted -- a poor one, common and shop-soiled, but still it was an ideal; and it gave his character a peculiar charm.

As for Donald Trump, he's really an icon of democracy, just slightly shop-soiled. The coveted title of World's Leading Demagogue has just gone to the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

John Macquarrie, that brilliant Scottish theologian, once wrote that, like display items in shops, we had allowed our faith to become shop-soiled. Let us brighten it up.

In Brighton this week, Vince Cable's shop-soiled Liberal Democrats seem so contaminated by the disastrous ConDem coalition they have nothing to lose from starting again.

IKids of my generation, for whom the '80s were their playground, have only fond memories of Saturday morning TV programmes like Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, where our star in suspect knitwear facilitated the exchange of shop-soiled Scalextric sets for some new wheels for your BMX.

Burton was particularly obsessed by Rex Harrison and his wife Rachel Roberts, who form a sort of cut-price, shop-soiled even more sozzled version of the Burtons.

But given the LibDems' leader's status as the most shop-soiled politician in the UK, I wouldn't count on it.

Eventually, you will look shabby, secondhand, and shop-soiled.

She wanted to see the "greatest city in the world", a London packed with music halls and pubs, and her extramarital sex life began as soon as they arrived.Crippen found work as manager of an American patent medicine firm while trying to keep up with Belle and her shop-soiled new friends - although she never stopped taunting him in front of them.

Hasn't it dawned on them that his shop-soiled past pays them no compliments?

I was amazed to hear an Israeli utter the old, shop-soiled complaint: 'How can you negotiate with someone who wants to kill you!' when it is the Israelis themselves who are doing most of the killing.