Word: clingingly
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...there would soon be lying horizontal underground. Like the middle class whose poet he became, Tennyson spent most of his life in a vague struggle to soften, to disavow the harsh materialism of mines and factories that made the wealth of England and killed her poor in slums; to cling to the beauty of the spirit and to belief...
...great failure of the book is Mr. Blanshard's unwillingness or inability to look to the root of some of the strange anomalies which he merely touches in scanning American Catholicism. Were he to investigate "the core of faith" which Catholic liberals cling to "even when they look with repugnance on the autocratic ecclesiastical system imposed upon the people by the priests," he might gain valuable insight into the more important non-political motives of the Church. As it is, his disdain for the hierarchy blinds the balance of his insight so that he never separates the mystic from...
...many more tedious and barren stretches, but they are frequently relieved by Novelist Compton-Burnett's most characteristically brilliant qualities. There are flashes of darting spite ("I hope I am not disturbing you at your luncheon, Mrs. Cassidy." "Thank you, Miss James. It is so kind to cling to the hope") and devastating responses to thoughtless queries ("Why should not school be an open and natural life, like any other?" "Like what other?" said Mr. Firebrace). There are also numerous succinct summings-up whose blandness is more savage than savagery itself: "Maria had also a vein of justice...
...Still more wretched than the dispossessed are the peasants who cling to their village. Thousands of them were impressed into the guerrilla forces. Some died horribly in the mountains, some who would not fight were penned like cattle in Albanian and Bulgarian camps...
...most of the U.S., "squash" is still only a vegetable. But in some large cities, most notably Philadelphia, Boston and New York, it is a fast, sweaty court game for young men, and the middle-aged who cling to the illusion of physical fitness. A businessman who has no afternoons for golf can squeeze in a game of squash racquets after work, shed a few pounds, get home in time for dinner. At Yale, about five times as many students play it on the university's 86 courts (costing some $300,000) as any other sport...