"At Columbia, he cleaned up an appalling mess that he inherited and turned it into a successful company," Puttnam said.

"So there you have it," said Slartibartfast, making a feeble and perfunctory attempt to clear away some of the appalling mess of his study.

Saints have mercy, she was making an appalling mess of everything.

His face was an appalling mess, a wreckage of tissues damaged by a bad atmospheric entry.

They've been preprogrammed to transmute the entire planet and everything on it into the most appalling mess our scientists could conceive.

Eddie Killoran, area manager with Turning Point, said: 'It's an appalling mess.

"This doesn't change anything," he sputtered, trying to salvage something out of this appalling mess.

Brown and Balls bailed out the banks and bequeathed to the nation the appalling mess that we face today.

It is an appalling and comical mess, which Mueller sees largely in terms of honest, hard-working farmers versus slippery businessmen.

"Things were in an incredibly appalling mess before he came," a foreign expert said.