1 Michael Beard is rackety, quarrelsome, competitive, greedy, ambitious, politicking.

2 He also laughs at the Observer's suggestion that he writes about "rackety sex".

3 I missed the slower trains with the lounge cars and the rackety wheels.

4 It was immortalised by Xu Zhimo, a 20th-century poet with all the attributes required for lasting celebrity: talent, a rackety love life and a dramatic early death (plane crash at 34).

5 Once free of the taxi I began trudging a quarter mile or so the bridge trembling under the weight of its traffic piled with noisy green taxis and rackety buses some without side panels or mufflers.

6 Born into a wealthy family in 1928, he studied to be a doctor, but chose instead the infinitely more rackety and less respectable life of a manga cartoonist.