The one-joke-for-all-people theory is the reason why Mr Izzard, who came to the fore as a motor-mouthed transvestite, thought he could play Bruce, the fast-talking, short-lived, stand-up comedian who became famous in the early 1960s for saying the unsayable.

ECONOMIST: Eddie Izzard

That task grew more difficult in May, when news broke that federal prosecutors were looking into allegations that MCI, since 1994 and be-fore merging into WorldCom, had be-gun illegally disguising long-distance calls as local ones to avoid paying the Bells millions of dollars in access fees--and continues to do so.

FORBES: Screaming Match

This will hugely increase both the range of Internet applications with high-quality streamed video to the fore and the convenience of gaining access to Internet-based services.

ECONOMIST: The future: Tomorrow’s Internet | The

However, as the wicket livened up under the lights, Tendulkar came to the fore with a 102-ball masterclass featuring a sumptuous array of leg-side flicks and drives through the arc between point and cover.

BBC: Sachin Tendulkar is bowled off an inside edge

Herbaceous borders and mixed bedding, both originating in 17th-century France, came to the fore and with them the ill-tempered public disputes between William Robinson, an advocate of informal plant groupings, and Reginald Blomfield, who longed for a return to greater formality.

ECONOMIST: The curious history of herbaceous borders

One points to a land origin in which lizards started to burrow, and as they adapted to their subterranean existence, their legs were reduced and lost - first the fore-limbs and then the hind-limbs.

BBC: Studying how snakes got legless

Leicester flanker Tom Croft, whose aerial prowess and athletic ability came to the fore in England's final two Six Nations matches, also misses out, along with international team-mate and Wasps fly-half Danny Cipriani and Wales and Ospreys number 10 James Hook.

BBC: O'Connell handed Lions captaincy

We drove past my old high school: there were bars on the windows where there hadn't been before I went to prison, armed uniformed guards out front where be-fore there'd been old-lady hall monitors with whistles, and I imagined that the bars and the guards were there to protect the students from me and not some teenage crazy in a trench coat stuffed with home-made ordnance.

NPR: Chapter 1