A curve of dull, grey metal sliding into the Square, carrying away the lower corner of a housefront as it came.

The article included a picture of Rumsfeld's long tree-lined driveway that showed a birdhouse and small portion of the housefront.

Every third housefront, it seemed, had "Drax the Protector" scrawled on it in charcoal or whitewash.

From around 1670 the most prominent features of a housefront were its entrance, with pillars on each side and possibly a balcony above it, but no further decoration.

After his death, the king purchased the plot and commissioned Hardouin-Mansart to design a housefront that the buyers of plots round the square would agree to adhere to.

The braid-seller spilled half her tray scrambling to the side of the street, and Nynaeve was just as quick to squeeze herself against the stone housefront alongside the gaping woman.

Close behind it followed another, exactly similar contrivance which slanted its way to the left, in our direction, wrecking the housefront on the nearer corner of the street as it came.

This cruelty causes Heathcliff to entertain thoughts of bringing Hindley down, as he tells Nelly Dean that he would love to "paint the housefront with Hindley's blood!"

In one, the facade of a doll house is photographed against a window, with the houses across the street looming in the background; elsewhere, a housefront outlined in Christmas lights seems more threatening than cheerful.

It is nicknamed "De Papegaai" (The Parrot) because it was originally hidden in a garden behind a regular housefront that belonged to a bird-trader in the days when Catholicism could not be practised publicly.

Rising to his stockinged feet, he grasped the gutter of the roof overhead and pulled, slowly raising himself by the strength of his arms, long toes scrabbling for a grip in the crevices between the mortared stones of the housefront.

He began carving argillite in 1972 and became apprenticed to his older brother, the carver Robert Davidson, during the carving of a housefront and houseposts in honour of their grandmother Florence Davidson's father Charles Edenshaw in 1977 and 1978.

And even as we stared that face contorted; the whole housefront seemed to soften and swell, the mouth to work, the heavy stone lintel and pillars of the doorway flexing like lips, the rain-slickened stair a curling, glistening tongue reaching out hungrily towards us as we struggled in the rain.