pluck up

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer - who has so far resisted calls to reinstate Ms Abbott as a Labour MP - said the PM should pluck up the "courage to hand back the £10m".

It had taken me a year to pluck up the courage to tell him that I was engaging in self-induced vomiting, food restriction and laxative and diuretic abuse.

It took me 10 minutes to pluck up the courage to call him, to ask if he and his partner were all right.

"In my case, I was 14 and 15, for me to pluck up the courage - I didn't even tell my family," he said.

But Beth, though yearning for the grand piano, could not pluck up courage to go to the ‘Mansion of Bliss’, as Meg called it.