From the time of Peter the Great until 1914, Russia's inexorable expansion was a source of anxious wonder to the rest of the world.

The Sugar Association would have a hard time convincing me that, soft drinks aside, calorie-rich sweets are not contributing to the inexorable expansion of the American waistline.

The cultivators who gradually cleared the forest were probably Bantu speaking people, whose slow but inexorable expansion gradually took over most of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.

In 1792 Al-Wahhab died but the inexorable expansion of the Saudi-Wahhabi emirate continued.

With the inexorable expansion of Adelaide's suburbs, the land was sold to developers.

It was occupied by the French Finance Ministry until 1989, when the ministry finally moved out, after years of kicking and screaming, to make way for the Louvre's inexorable expansion.

When it appeared that our inexorable expansion was threatening not just their own mysterious projects but their home system, the Ghosts began, for the first time, to resist us.

MacDonagh's first book The Passenger Acts: A Pattern of Government Growth (1961) was a critique of the inexorable expansion of government bureaucracy in the nineteenth century.

The sell-off is causing anxiety across the New Economy - even if many experts predict that Internet technology will continue its inexorable expansion into virtually all parts of the old economy.

A few weeks ago Mr. Gallin talked about "the seemingly inexorable expansion" of financial-services companies.