We inhabit a post-pastoral terrain, full of modification and compromise, and for this reason my glossaries began to fill up with "unnatural" language: terms from coastal sea defences (pillbox, bulwark, rock-armour), or soft estate, the Highways Agency term for those natural habitats that have developed along the verges of motorways and trunk roads.
The Muslim men in their traditional black pillbox hats contrast with miniskirted young girls.
It was glamorous and elitist, an amalgam of his father's wealth, John Kennedy's charisma and easy wit, Jacqueline Kennedy's beauty and fashion sense (the suits and pillbox hats she wore became widely popular), the charm of their children and relatives, and the erudition of the Harvard advisers who surrounded him (called the "best and brightest" by author David Halberstam).
The accelerating voltage is applied by electrodes, called dees from their shape: each is a D-shaped half of a pillbox.
An ion source is located at the centre of an evacuated chamber that has the shape of a short cylinder, like a pillbox, between the poles of an electromagnet that creates a uniform field perpendicular to the flat faces.
At Sheffield he directed the university theatre company and cultivated his radical bona fides with forays into socialism and a penchant for wearing pillbox hats.
(Meanwhile, at his bidding, Latour engaged in sodomy with him.) The young women helped themselves liberally to the marquis's pillbox filled with candies that contained the aphrodisiac Spanish fly.
Literary and painterly, too, is David Hughes's The Pillbox (Cape, £18.99), which takes that British cultural cornerstone, the seaside holiday, and hews of it something shocking and painful.
It was now almost dark and there was no firing from the enemy; ploughing across the final stretch of mud, I saw grenades bursting around the pillbox and a party of British rushed in from the other side.
It's well worth ordering the transfer, particularly if you're arriving after an overnight flight, as the bellhops in their red coats and pillbox hats really look after you well.
Eleven-year-old Jack stumbles upon a WW2-era pillbox buried under the sand and a boy called Bill.
