City look stronger, fitter and more motivated than last season and even at this early stage the gap feels like a sizeable advantage. Yes, it is way too early to make snap judgments about the impact on the title race. It has, however, been long enough to ascertain that Manuel Pellegrini’s team are going to make a much better fist of it this time.

A nightgown with a high neck and long sleeves may have the fullness set into a yoke.

A select number of these robbers haunted him through his dreams, and he came to know them quite well. […] [H]e believed in omens and thought-transference, and he deemed these dream-robbers to be the astral projection of real personages who happened at those particular moments, no matter where they were in the flesh, to be harboring designs, in the spirit, upon his wealth.

The worthy winner soon discovered, I may add, and the subject of many side-bets in the pubbie was Old Hand George Robbie's good Red Cock bred out of the continental stuff.