The matter of Sarah's own genesis is subject to an equally artful unpicking.

A small pair of scissors, about 15cm (6in) long are useful for trimming or unpicking.

There cannot be any unpicking of items in that deal, otherwise the whole thing risks falling apart."

If he were to guess, another day and part of a night might have passed in the slow unpicking of his life's failings.

Ones that, by unpicking the awkwardness of female adolescence and providing a place to talk about it, have helped feminism become almost fashionable."

As annual traditions go, this is the festival of anti-joy: the ritualised unpicking of pleasure.

And Ms. Westwood was the one doing the unpicking, copying and restitching.

In order to pursue its economic policies, the Conservatives had to construct an ideological climate which justified its unpicking of the Welfare State.

Austria's defeat and the unpicking of part of the 1815 Treaty system had, it was felt, begun to alter the whole balance of power in France's favour.

Why is it that our broadcast media seem to be incapable of unpicking the spin of government and reporting the facts behind the changes that this lot are racing through parliament?

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow (Allen Lane £25) - a terrific unpicking of human rationality and irrationality - could hardly have been published at a better moment.

The unpicking of those man-ropes did much more harm than the raising of the barge to its usual place on deck - in itself most unusual, reprehensible, but not downright insane, or even worse, unlucky.

There had been plenty of time to think during the slow process of unpicking the gold braid from his diplomatic uniform, during the long wait sitting half-naked in the bath-house and in the various boxes to which he had been confined throughout the night.

It seems to me that we do indeed need such reflection, but we need it so that we can draw lessons from the systematic unpicking to which this infamous model has been subjected practically everywhere over the last few years, in the name of ‘the market above all’.

In the article, entitled "Peer review, politics and pluralism", Dr. Harrison noted that "many of the critical reviews of The Skeptical Environmentalist went beyond the usual unpicking of a thesis and concentrated instead on the role of the publisher in publishing the book at all.