Word: sheerly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...despite the richness of James' brand of fiction, the book never seems overburdened or contrived. Her smooth unravelling of the mystery's details works hand-in-hand with her psychological portraits to create a work that is at once sheer entertainment and complex social inquiry. A Taste for Death may not go down in literary history as a great British novel, but it is a great British mystery...
American officials in the know insist that much of this story is sheer invention intended to make the U.S. look ludicrous. What really happened, they say, was this: McFarlane, North and two bodyguards did visit Tehran, but their passports were neither U.S. nor Irish. Also, they carried no Bible, cake or guns. They stayed in Tehran four or five days and managed to meet a number of Iranian officials, possibly including Rafsanjani, although accounts differ on that subject. Stories vary too on what, if anything, the mission accomplished. Some say that McFarlane's contacts with the Iranians were amicable, others...
...strain between the all-over pattern and the real motifs gives his Nice paintings their special vitality. But the strain was real, and in extreme cases, like Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground, 1925-26, it induces an almost palpable discomfort. The sheer congestion of pattern -- rococo mirror, painted wallpaper, overlapping rugs, Ming blue planter -- dismays the eye while seducing it, and the architectonic forms of the nude halt the whirling of color like a massive log brusquely jammed in the gears of a machine. This is the creation not of a complacent man but of an artist...
Totality and irreversibility are related. It used to be thought that totalitarianism had repealed the law of history by which power sows the seeds of its own destruction. If sheer ruthless vigilance could destroy any center of opposition, even any island of independent thought, then -- aside from external conquest, which alone destroyed Nazism -- totalitarian rule could never be reversed...
Does this mean we are about to witness a long string of Administration defeats in Congress? No. First, in terms of sheer bulk, there is not much that President Reagan wants from Congress except to protect the gains achieved largely in the first year, which is a much easier task to accomplish than policy initiation. He has the smallest domestic legislative agenda of any President in the post-war era, and whatever rhetoric he has committed to social issues like prayer in the schools and the prohibition of abortions, they have never been serious interests of the Administration. Second...