He was watching the dogs parade before the seventh race, and making notes; he wore the kind of flat green cap that Henry associated with butchers or publicans or plucky men down on their luck.
"It's clear that against Barcelona you have no chance," he said, playing the plucky little man, at the world's highest-earning club.
But while Mr. Berhanyer's Spanish contemporaries like Manuel Pertegaz have receded from the limelight, this plucky, defiant man from Córdoba still churns out a prêt-à-porter collection for the Madrid catwalk each season.
In PluckyWorld, the coalition had been an unmitigated triumph.
There were surprisingly large contingents from India and the United States, and plucky one-man delegations from Botswana, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (though the latter's participant looked suspiciously Kyrgyz).
He energetically promoted trade and shipping, left a national heritage of fine buildings, and won repute as a plucky, hard-drinking man of grim wit and great resource.
Mr. Gleisner came up with an idea for a movie: the story of the plucky Australians who manned the radio telescope in Parkes, New South Wales, and found themselves relaying the first images of Neil Armstrong's Moon walk to a breathlessly waiting world.
Loved and loathed in equal measure, it is an apt symbol of the city's accidental planning system, the result of a plucky gamble by a man who had never built anything taller than industrial sheds in Portsmouth and Warrington.
This being a Lifetime movie, all the houses are palatial, all the women are plucky, and all the men are either soulless devils, like Andrew, or bland helpmeets, like Daniel.
As for blowing up, there is no better method for showing an image to a crowd — taking a mouse-size mouse, say, and throwing it onto a screen, where it assumes the dimensions, and some of the pluckier habits, of a man.
This book could have easily fallen into a familiar pattern at this point: crusty rich man falls for plucky poor girl and they live happily ever after despite his physical limitations.
