twopenny-halfpenny

He has twopenny-halfpenny French prints of women with languishing eyes, dressed in dominoes, — guitars, gondolas, and so forth, — and tells you stories about them.

The Book of Snobs 2006

Firkin a twopenny-halfpenny present, accompanied it with so many compliments, that the twopence-half-penny was transmuted into gold in the heart of the grateful waiting-maid, who, besides, was looking forwards quite contentedly to some prodigious benefit which must happen to her on the day when Mrs. Bute came into her fortune.

Vanity Fair 2006

She was causing a bit of a sensation, titillating the drinkers and deliberately embarrassing the man she appeared to be with, a bit of a sensation in his own right, I gathered, on account of his being a twopenny-halfpenny actor in a onepenny-halfpenny television soap.

Kalooki Nights Howard Jacobson 2006

Rosalba, who, mounting higher and higher, wraps herself about in sacking, and then, with a look of indifference and satiety as if she had renounced and suffered and dedicated herself to some insane act of defiance for no pleasure of her own, dives into the Channel and brings up a twopenny-halfpenny soup-plate between her teeth.

The Common Reader, Second Series 2004

Some changes have been forced upon us; little things which they had forgotten — quite minor matters; and they now say that they will be obliged to divide against us on these twopenny-halfpenny, hair-splitting points.

Framley Parsonage 2004

How strange, that in a country like this, boasting of its education, and certainly with every facility for its prosecution -- how strange, that in the very Athens of the Republic, the deluded masses should exhibit as complete ignorance as you could find in the gallery of any twopenny-halfpenny metropolitan theatre of the old country!

Lands of the Slave and the Free Cuba, the United States, and Canada Henry A. Murray

"Ah, take care, take care, Hadria; that is a mood in which one may mistake any twopenny-halfpenny little luminary for the impossible moon."

The Daughters of Danaus Mona Caird

They get round you and worry you, 'he declaimed, rising, and striding about the room, with an occasional double-handed clutch at the lapels of his coat, his one gesture of rage --' they worry you for their twopenny-halfpenny mouthful of lineage, and they'd gnaw their own mothers out of their coffins for the same reward. '

Despair's Last Journey David Christie Murray

If you love him enough to trust him with the whole of the rest of your life, you can surely trust him over a twopenny-halfpenny little secret which, after all, has nothing in the world to do with you.

The Splendid Folly Margaret Pedler

The smallest clerkships, twopenny-halfpenny postmasterships in unheard-of villages -- all, all that can be dispensed with, must make way for the friends of the incomers to power.

Lands of the Slave and the Free Cuba, the United States, and Canada Henry A. Murray