Thus Lord King asserted, February 28, 1818, "That the whole of what the noble Secretary of State, Lord Liverpool, had said, amounted to this, that the Sinking Fund was only nominal, and had not paid one shilling of the debt." To which Lord Liverpool replied, "He begged to differ with his Lordship, and was of opinion, that the Sinking Fund was real."

Most of the conversation was taken up with an agonised appraisal of the Prince's [i.e., Charles, Prince of Wales's] proper role, together with much royal muttering (conventional wisdom in 1985) that Britain had lost its dynamism for which it was once famous. I begged to differ, and implored the Prince to consider the new, entrepreneurial, street-cred economy being created at that very moment in the clubs and streets, the fashion houses and TV studios and advertising agencies of Soho and Covent Garden.

Now the pluralists may say that a place where they run up new houses, and pull down old ones, is by no means disqualified for occupation, but he begs to differ from them decidedly.

Esther Lardent, chief consultant to the ABA's Post Conviction Death Penalty Representation Project, which has helped recruit pro bono lawyers for death row appeals since 1987, begs to differ. Finding a lawyer to represent a death row inmate has never been easy, Lardent says. And finding one now, she says, will be harder than ever.

Fortunately, bowerbirds cannot talk, so we are free to use sexual selection to explain their work, without them begging to differ.

… I saw this morning that the Supreme Leader of Iran said that street challenge is not acceptable. This is challenging democracy after the elections. Well, we beg to differ and the people of Iran are begging to differ. When you can count paper ballots, millions of them, within a couple of hours, something's funny.

If The Adventures Of Tintin and The BFG suggested that the director's craftsmanship rarely extends to entirely CGI worlds, this IMAX-scaled spectacle begs to differ.

Beg to differ

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Verb

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