Desultory

Their desultory and often painfully facetious conversations are interspersed with picture-postcard vignettes in which presenter and guest savour the delights of holiday life in the capital.

After a few desultory job interviews, she discussed the idea with her husband and established an office in the spare bedroom, with an old wallpaper pasting table for a desk and banana boxes as filing cabinets.

In the absence of accurate accounting, political debate over some of the most momentous issues of the age is proceeding in an empirical vacuum, and has become much more confused and desultorythan it needs to be.

Her recent mysterious suicide is the talk of Wisteria Lane, the upper-class street that’s home to a clique of attractive, desultory wives and mothers whose secrets are far juicier than average.

Conversation was desultory and difficult, centring mainly around Amarinth’s unwillingness to devote enough of her time to homework.

There are desultory protests in the ‘pen’, but that’s a shockingly depressing situation.

It seemed initially that the new Indian government wanted to accomplish what it had not succeeded in 30 years of desultory negotiations under the Shimla agreement.

So, he’s speaking with another man in a desultory fashion (nothing that seemed important, just killing time).

Slave patrols, rather than being desultory or inadequate, turn out to be one of the chief ways that the southern states enforced their peculiar institution.

As our desultory , lacklustre conversation progressed, it became clear that he was expecting me to ‘pitch’ to him in some way.

There is desultory chitchat on the verandah as evening slides into pitch-dark night.

Unfortunately, the propagation of another leg to the equity bubble, however rapid the money pumping, will still require that earnings show at least the occasional desultory promise of improvement.

Into this somewhat desultory discussion among historians a sociologist has now tossed a bombshell.

Two dusky stable hands were leading a pair of thoroughbred around the ‘cooling rings’ of adjoining stables at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans and engaging in desultory conversation.

Clashes and desultory fighting continued in Samarra north of Baghdad between US forces and Sunni Arab guerrillas.

But officials have repeatedly postponed a second session as desultory talks have dragged on over the division of top Cabinet posts among Iraq’s religious and ethnic groups.

The first incoming flight, organised by the CIA, was welcomed with desultory bursts of anti-aircraft fire.

Ayodhya has been subject to desultory and very limited archaeological investigations since the 19th century.

The discussions are desultory and most MPs, barring a few, do not even come prepared with their facts and figures.

There was a halting, desultory conversation, and he never mentioned the script.

They are too often reminiscent of desultory common-room conversation on those first nights at college, when no one knew anyone and everyone was defensive, posturing, or simply uninterested.

And some desultory clicking around Microsoft Office didn’t see the power consumption get much above one watt.

Every ten to fifteen years, the earth wobbles in a desultory fashion somewhere in these islands and a roof slate or two drops off.

In parts of Africa, especially the most remote rural areas, colonial rule had only a minimal direct economic effect, except for sometimes rather desultory attempts to impose taxes on people who had not previously used money.

Some putter along in a slightly languid and desultory fashion.

Before the workers entered the heritage conservation scene, there had been only desultory efforts at saving historical architecture and the urban environment in Australia.

The salad may have been a bit desultory and almost Parmesan-less, but the beautifully moist carpaccio of (as it turned out, virtually chilli-less) beef more than made up for it.

We don’t want aimless acts any more than we want desultory negotiations.

His perception was that the desultory and undisciplined Chinese people did not deserve a democratic system.