Word: sheer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pyramids & Polemics. Das Kapital's sheer size-three volumes and more than 2,000 pages-is almost enough to endow it with a religious aura. The work, says British Historian Isaiah Berlin, "has been blindly worshiped and blindly hated by millions who have not read a line of it, or have read without understanding its obscure and tortuous prose." Since 1917, more than 6,000,000 copies of it have been printed in the Soviet Union. Yet the Albanians, who have been Communists for two dec ades, managed to do without it until last year, when they published...
...London music magazine puts it. One track features Drummer Ringo Starr quavering, "I get high with a little help from my friends." Another number, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, evokes a drug-induced hallucination, and even the initials of the title spell out LSD, though the Beatles plead sheer coincidence...
With good reason. Not only are they welded together by the sheer fact of being the Beatles, but they also share a common lower-middle-class background in the sooty, Victorian shadows of Liverpool. Paul, the son of a cotton salesman, and John, who was raised by an aunt after his father deserted the family, were playing together as early as 1955. George, whose father was a bus driver, joined them in 1958. Two years later they met Ringo (born Richard Starkey), a docker's son. Their families were dubious about musical careers...
According to Pike, the traditional authoritative sources for Christian doctrine are all suspect. The Bible, for example, is not only shot through with "superstition, sheer evil and flat contradiction," but did not even exist in its present form until several centuries after the founding of Christianity. The bishop similarly dismisses the infallibility of church councils on the ground, among others, that Christian denominations disagree violently on how many there really were; Roman Catholics accept 21 ecclesiastical synods as ecumenical councils, the Greek Orthodox only seven. He also contends that the creeds did not take shape until several centuries after Christ...
...photographs in this distinguished and expensive book on Dublin are sheer poetry. The text achieves an even rarer quality; it is sheer prose, in the best sense of the term...