Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Finley of England's Cambridge University and H.W. Picket of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, have culled through ancient records, reviewed the writings of poets and philosophers from Pindar to Plato to reconstruct just what the first games were like. Their account is enlightening. For sheer ballyhoo, bitterness and confusion, the ancient games resemble the modern Olympics much more than anyone might imagine...
...like so many other nations, but in a conflict over principles. Those principles were thought to be universal, which was part of the reason for the unprecedented policy of throwing the new country open to all comers. That not only served to make the U.S. a world power in sheer numbers (compared, for instance, with Canada, which kept its population small and has complained ever since about being overpowered by its southern neighbor). It also greatly reinforced the abstract and ideological nature of American patriotism. The millions from other lands and other cultures had different loves for many different plots...
...today, or composes like Haydn), but jazz continues to flower cumulatively, taking on and transforming the new without ever abandoning the old. It is a fugue with a life of its own, endlessly recapitulating itself. If its vitality dims from time to time under the onslaught of fads or sheer noise, jazz simply sits out a few sets, catches its breath and comes back refreshed...
...fighting and the men who fought. Readers deeply imbued with the modern notion that wars are per se bad and boring, that wars never settle anything anyway, are advised to check these sentiments at the library door. Then, as now, to be sure, geopolitics, diplomacy, economics, and above all, sheer chance, played a vast role in the affairs of men. But Americans and Englishmen of 200 years ago, unlike men today, lumped all such contingencies under the heading of Providence. They clearly believed that a few brave men, with some help from Providence, might change the course of history. Such...
Neither the son from the Class of '06 who drowned on the Titanic nor his mother who donated the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library in his name would dare venture now beyond the confines of Harry's Memorial Room. The sheer chaos of life, of Harvard graduates--once the only students allowed to use the huge facility--having to share carrols or "stalls" as they are affectionately called, with undergraduates and visiting scholars, would have been too difficult for the Wideners to handle...