stroppiness

Such stroppiness would have amounted to commercial suicide after ten months of silence.

This stroppiness means that one solution to the debt crisis is a non-starter.

'I have certainly got my dad's stroppiness, but also his competitive spirit," he says.

But the combination of media stereotyping and perceived prejudice (sometimes dubbed “polonophobia”) is prompting increasing stroppiness.

“He attracts criticism, but in his very English stroppiness he also provokes it.”

The strange analogy was delivered earnestly but also with a definite air of conceit, or at the very least, stroppiness.

Hizbullah’s stroppiness is based partly on its insistence on maintaining its independent “resistance” militia.

Most of those there seemed between 60 and 80; generally spry, with a dogged air tinged with stroppiness.

Few could do teenage stroppiness as well as Charlene and this row with mother Madge was one of her greatest.

That's due in part to lingering French admiration and respect for insurrectional and revolutionary movements, and a national inclination toward stroppiness.

Researchers identified the link between stroppiness and the size of the amygdala when they carried out brain scans on 137 children who had been arguing with their parents.

Emma is more lovable – cleverer and more honest than Dexter, but prone to stroppiness and self-doubt.

Brie Williams, an American geriatrician, says many jailers mistake mild dementia, hard to spot in a regimented environment, for stroppiness.

Laura Morera, leading the three harlots, is hilarious: she may have a soft spot for Romeo, but she won't let that soften her stroppiness.

But stroppiness, as long as it is a focused, intelligent, rational stroppiness, can win you what you want.

Emollient behaviour, such as Poland’s current diplomacy under its polished prime minister, Donald Tusk, may bring modest rewards, but stroppiness has incurred little visible penalty.

And it needn’t be physical (note the ball-breaking style favoured by women on The Apprentice, and the outbreaks of dreadful stroppiness in she-columnists such as this one).

She has lost every shred of dignity with her expenses claims and compounds her error with media appearances in which she veers from stroppiness to contrition.

But was he not, at least in part, master of his own downfall through attitude - he's pleaded guilty to sullenness and stroppiness - and a hectic lifestyle?

And it was his spectacular stroppiness, his grumpy meanness and his adeptness at Olympic-level moaning that really got the critics raving.

All this was directed with rather more verve than it deserved by David Blair, and if you want endlessly escalating stroppiness than Eccleston is always your man.

Either way, I would much rather Madonna's shameless, starry stroppiness over Taylor Swift's pretence at being everyone's BFF.

The pink creature (played with winning childish stroppiness by Remy Beasley) turns into a tyrannical "Turbo Capitalist", forcing the others to work in her candy factory.

One moment Hurrell's face was a picture of joy, the next - as she rolled her eyes the second she thought her segment was over - it was a study in stroppiness.

With his alarmed-spaniel eyes and jutting-jawed stroppiness, his geography teacher elbow-patches and Medusan hair, he radiates mess...His ineptness as a sleuth provided some fine comic moments.