(1) Spinning around, she jabbed the hilt of her dagger into the stomach of the assassin, causing him to blench , his body going limp as he fell to the floor, unconscious.

(2) Martha Stewart would blench at the Beehive decor, and it's hard to imagine Helen Clark posing with fluffy Persian cats, but otherwise Martha and Helen could pretty much swap places.

(3) That this debate would be directly relevant to Michelangelo's poetry, let alone to Petrarch's, is a stretch that might have made literary critics blench .

(4) He kept passing worse and worse laws to see if Jack Straw on the opposite bench would blench at each ever more extreme law and order measure.

(5) A headline in the current Spectator made me blench .

(6) Purists and pedants alike regularly blench when they see the things even supposedly careful writers do with the apostrophe.

(7) Many philosophers blenched at the idea even of educating, let alone empowering, the common people.

(8) She blenched and left hurriedly; I doubt that she will be back.

(9) But even Melville might have blenched at Browning's final exordium.