A random dip into the list (p19, Feb-Dec 1992, 23 books) offers a fairly typical glance onto Art's bookshelf.
A random dip into the book (I followed John Sutherland's method and plumped for page 69) will inevitably reveal something bizarre, if not unintelligible; the text is strewn with ill-phrased sentences and reads like a first draft or even, at times, one of those saucy stories written by schoolgirls and passed under the desks during RE.
And like Mr and Mrs Bull, Miss Carrington and Mr Topham won their millions with a random Lucky Dip ticket.
Teachers now dip random phrases from suspiciously erudite student essays into Google to ensure that the work they are handed has had no previous owners.
Open more or less at random, though, and dip in, and you will be stunned by the sudden epiphanies, the utterly modern sentences: "Super-celestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord," he writes, giving as an example a philosopher who always pisses as he runs.
It was a chance encounter, a random swipe, an unlucky dip.
Dip at random into the letters, some of which are right up there with the great wit-shows of Horace Walpole and Sydney Smith, and you will immediately stumble upon plain events blooming into the surreal.
"I took a gamble on a 'bulk joblot,'" which Baxter describes as a sort of "lucky dip" of random bulk items.
Noise column represents the percentile of random noise added into DIP Yeast PPI dataset.
Eggs were collected between June 1 and June 10 , 2003 tadpoles were obtained about 6 weeks later (July 16 21) by catching a random sample with a dip net.
