Word: bluntly
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...Labor government ran into just that kind of resistance when House Leader Michael Foot tried to ram through a guillotine vote to restrict debate on the devolution bill, which would give limited home rule to Scotland and Wales. Furious, 22 rebellious Labor M.P.s joined the opposition long enough to blunt the guillotine motion by 312 to 283, a stunning 29-vote margin; 15 other Laborites abstained...
These bits of blunt advice are not delivered by a kindly country doctor but by an unusual new medical guide for lay people. Unlike most other books in this proliferating genre, Symptoms: The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia (Thomas Y. Crowell; $17.95) helps the medically untutored diagnose an illness as the professionals do: by its symptoms...
Personally disparate-Arafat is spartan and hyperbolic, Hussein congenial and blunt-the two men otherwise have more in common than either cares to admit. Hussein rules a rather shaky dynasty that was created by Western powers after World War I; Arafat is the strongest chieftain in a fragmented Palestinian movement that is principally held together by hatred of Israel-and distrust of other Arab rulers. Both have a genius for survival, a talent for accommodation...
Laughing Last is much closer to the book Alger Hiss should have written. If Tony Hiss errs, it is on account of a candor that at times is almost too blunt. We are told more about the sex lives of father and son than perhaps we want to know. But that flaw is understandable, the idea behind the book is to get us to see Alger Hiss as do those close to him, as "Al", the disciplined, kind, warm father and husband who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So we learn of Al's love...
...resisted because he felt it would not produce the desired result-and could damage detente as well. Last week the Soviets arrested a prominent dissident and expelled an American correspondent. Would the State Department maintain a sort of running commentary on such incidents as they occurred? Vance tried to blunt the issue by declaring that U.S. criticism of foreign governments should be neither "polemical" nor "strident," but would occur "from time to time when we see a threat to human rights...