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Nutshell   Listen
noun
Nutshell  n.  
1.
The shell or hard external covering in which the kernel of a nut is inclosed.
2.
Hence, a thing of little compass, or of little value.
3.
(Zool.) A shell of the genus Nucula.
in a nutshell in a summarized and very abbreviated form; of statments, descriptions, reports, and other communications; as, to describe the convention in a nutshell.
To be in a nutshell or To lie in a nutshell, to be within a small compass; to admit of very brief or simple determination or statement. "The remedy lay in a nutshell."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Nutshell" Quotes from Famous Books



... "It gives in a nutshell the miracle of art and the imagination. You get this queer irascible musician quite impossibly and unfortunately in love with a wealthy patroness, and then out of his brain comes THIS, a tapestry of glorious music, setting out love ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and preventing organization among regular factory hands. The matter lies in a nutshell. Industry which originated in the home could be safely carried on there only as long as it remained simple and the operations thereof such as one individual could complete. As soon as through the invention of power-driven machinery industry reached the stage ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... history the Baby who was destined to accomplish this miracle; to broaden out to their widest and noblest meanings these hopes which had been handed down from one generation of Jews to another. The story of the life of Jesus will be given in detail in other courses in this series. Here, in a nutshell, is what Jesus did: he helped men to believe in a God who loved all men as his children, whether rich or poor, learned or ignorant, Jews or Gentiles or Samaritans, even the bad as well as the good; for if they were bad, ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting

... Mr. Murdoch. "You've worked a while at printing. I'm willing you should see what you can do. I'd like to speak to Mary. I'm sorry to say that you'll have to sleep in the office, Jack, for we've only one spare room in this nutshell of a house." ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard

... in reality were created to bamboozle him still further. What chicanery failed to accomplish the remissness of officials successfully brought about, and the discomfort of the foreign inhabitants was complete. Beside domestic there were economic grievances. The position in a nutshell is given by one of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... in a nutshell—it would put a wet blanket on the project if they both backed down. In the meanwhile we canna hurry them. Ye will have to give ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... is to be known, or all that is interesting to know, about the places we visit. Then, again, our time as a rule being limited, we want the whole matter—history, antiquities, places of interest in the neighbourhood, etc. in a nutshell. The brief book serves its purpose well enough; but it is not thrown away like the newspaper and the magazines; however cheap and badly got up it may be, it is taken home to serve another purpose, to be a help to memory, and nobody can have it until its owner removes ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... doctor's degree, was merely passed on at a slightly accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me for the public to know. There in a nutshell you have the moral training of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I to ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... trying to write in this house. The ceilings are low and thin, and the walls are near and thin, and the children are omnipresent and not thin, and their wants and their joys and their quarrels are as numerous as the fishes in the sea, and there you have the problem in a nutshell. ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they've invented has more originality than I gave it ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... of words poured out from her: "It was a pretty scheme your Miss Verney had planned! She was to egg me on to divorce you, so that she could get a clutch on your feelings and marry you and your money! Your money—that puts it in a nutshell! That's the kind of woman a man like you falls in love with! A woman who's too shrewd and too cunning to commit herself. Who provokes and tantalizes and lures on a man, and then stops him short at the very ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... the whole thing in a nutshell," answered Milsom. "Of course it is altogether too early yet to express an opinion in public upon the occurrence; but, strictly between ourselves, and in the privacy of this saloon, I don't mind saying that I believe the Maine was ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... occasion identify themselves with either of the two functional units; more often they mediate between the two extremes, embodying one or more radical notions and also one or more subsidiary ones. We may put the whole matter in a nutshell by saying that the radical and grammatical elements of language, abstracted as they are from the realities of speech, respond to the conceptual world of science, abstracted as it is from the realities ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... all that makes the slum, has come nearer that ideal than any and all the rest of us. And the president of it these ten years, the same who with his brother tried to reform Gotham Court, is the head, too, of the citizens' union which is the whole reform programme in a nutshell. All of which is ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... those who would (even were Newton's theory practicable) compress the world into a nutshell, or neglect "aught toward the general good;" and one of our respected correspondents, who doubtless participates in these cosmopolitan sentiments, has furnished us with the original of the above view of COLOMBIA COLLEGE; seeing that this, like the universities ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various

... refused to ratify any consent or approbation of Sir Sidney Smith, and have wrote to both the Grand Vizir and the French General, the impossibility of permitting a vanquished army to be placed by one Ally in a position to attack another Ally." The last phrase put the facts in a nutshell, and illustrates well Nelson's power of going straight to the root of a matter, disregardful of confusing side-issues, of policy or timidity. To Hamilton he wrote passionately concerning the manifold difficulties caused to all, except the Turks and the Smiths. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... into politics, was the last Provincial President of Sulaco, and got shot after a battle. His father was a prominent business man in Sta. Marta, tried to keep clear of their politics, and died ruined after a lot of revolutions. And that's your Costaguana in a nutshell." ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... purchased that famous villa of Twickenham which his song and life celebrated; duteously bringing his old parents to live and die there, entertaining his friends there, and making occasional visits to London in his little chariot, in which Atterbury compared him to "Homer in a nutshell". ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... as, in my capacity of chairman of this—eh—char—that is to say, company, I was called upon to do. And I formed the opinion that the mind of the writer was—eh—warped." Lord Ferriby smiled sadly, and gave a final wave of the hand, as if to indicate that the whole matter lay in a nutshell, and that nutshell under his lordship's heel. "Warped or not," answered Cornish, "the man says that we have formed ourselves into a company, which company is bound to make huge profits, and those profits are naturally assumed to find their way ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... the little nutshell of a house his heart beat fast at the sight of a woman pinning clothes to the line. Her fingers, stiff and swollen, moved slowly. The same instinct that had guided him down this road made him dismount and tie his ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... discussed I must go to the women's clubs, or to Madam ——'s Current Topics Society. The latter is an extraordinary affair, where society women who have no time to read the news of the day listen to short lectures on the news of the preceding week, discussed pro and con, giving these women in a nutshell material for intelligent conversation when they meet senators and other men at the various receptions before which they wish ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... last forty years must be compressed into a nutshell. The famine was over at last, but its effects remained. Nearly a million of people had emigrated, yet the condition of life for those remaining was far from satisfactory. The Encumbered Estates Act, which had completed the ruin of many of the older proprietors, pressed, in some respects, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... never confuse functions or apply wrong tests. What can books do for us? Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nutshell (a cocoanut shell, if you will—Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires!), when he wrote that a book should teach us either to ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... higher. She even spurned the cake, and I was glad to let her deceive me. I liked to coddle myself with the belief that she never ate. I knew that she did not want me to see her eating, for then I must have classed her with the mass of women—with Mrs. Ruffle, whom I heard choking on a bit of nutshell; with her mother, who was standing near us talking in a voice muffled in food; I must have slipped off ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... wonder if they can be the children of that old-fangled race. Sometimes I think it's high time for me to go. There was a newspaper fellow down here when the General Walker came ashore, and, after asking a lot of questions, he put the case in a nutshell. "You're a link with the past," he said; "that's what you are." I don't know if he invented the expression, or if he picked it up somewhere and used it on me, but it's a ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... said Miss Tredgold in a contemptuous tone. "But, anyhow, put on the best you have got. Believe me, I have not come to this house to sit down with my hands before me. I have come to work, to renovate, to restore, to build up. Not another word, Henry. I have put the matter into a nutshell, and you and your children must learn to submit to the arrival ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade

... conveys a feeling of charmed security, as if an invisible boundary checked the pattering drops and held the moaning wind. The front tent I share, as yet, with my adjutant; in the inner apartment I reign supreme, bounded in a nutshell, with no bad dreams. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... distance, when a sudden gust of wind, rushing forth from the narrow gorges of the valley of the Rhone, stirred up the waves of the lake, and produced one of those short seas which so often prove fatal. The sail of the little boat was soon gone, and it seemed like a nutshell dancing on the still-increasing waves. It was impossible to think of returning, and full half an hour of fatigue and danger must elapse before the boat could be moored in safety under the hanging cliffs of ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... resumed, leading the way downstairs; "but it would be only the same thing over and over again. A nervous patient who always has his own way is a nervous patient who is never worried; and a nervous patient who is never worried is a nervous patient cured. There it is in a nutshell! Come and see the Dispensary, ladies; the Dispensary and ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... meeting in the Black Forest. Germany has shown England the greater advantage of a German-English coalition, and France is frozen out. England, with her shrewd alertness to make the most profitable deal, entertained if did not close the German proposition. In a nutshell, it ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... pleasure without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity, and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... Wesley himself did not assert that these statements were true. He wished, he said, to be quite fair to the Brethren; he wished to give them a chance of clearing themselves; and, therefore, he now published his pamphlet entitled "Queries to Count Zinzendorf." It contained the whole case in a nutshell. For the sum of sixpence the ordinary reader had now the case against the Brethren in ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... I can help you; I believe you can assist me. There is the position in a nutshell. I am honest. I make no pretence of liking unprofitable friends myself. But we will talk afterward, monsieur," he added, as a servant announced supper, and De Froilette led the way into an adjoining room. The meal was ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner

... wants, ma'am. Take my word for it, this matter rests entirely with you. It's all in a nutshell. Encourage her to confide ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins

... as of odour, fruit, gum, resin, wax, honey, seem brought about in the same manner as in the glands of animals; the tasteless moisture of the earth is converted by the hop plant into a bitter juice; as by the caterpillar in the nutshell, the sweet powder is converted into a bitter powder. While the power of absorption in the roots and barks of vegetables is excited into action by the fluids applied to their mouths like the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... nothing less than the universality of the best education could now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To put the matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational system rests: first, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... the English flock abroad in shoals, like the swallows quitting our cold country, to return again some time. France has been pretty well used up, so now we fall upon Germany. Stalkenberg was that year particularly full, for its size—you might have put it in a nutshell; and it derived its importance, name, and most else belonging to it, from its lord of the soil, the Baron von Stalkenberg. A stalwart old man was the baron, with grizzly hair, a grizzled beard, and manners as loutish as those of the boars he hunted. He had four sons ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood

... up in a nutshell the whole history of the great movement for the conversion of the Jews. We dip ourselves in baptismal water and wipe ourselves with a Talith. We are not a race to be lured out of the fixed feelings of countless centuries by the empty spirituality of a religion in which, as I soon found ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... glance been able to take in this imposing spectacle, when the storm, which had long been impending, burst forth with tremendous violence; the wind howled furiously amongst the rigging, and the galley was tossed like a nutshell from crest to crest of the foaming waves; each moment bringing it into more dangerous proximity to the rocky shoals of that iron-bound shore. The light from the burning town showed the Venetians all the dangers of their situation; and their peril was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... the news to that effect is no doubt contained in that document. It was a question of price—it always is. I knew your father's bid, and—I went a few thousands higher and got the prize. That's the story in a nutshell. Of course there are a number of complications and details, but I spare you them; in fact, I don't suppose you understand them. It is a mere ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... in a nutshell," my father assented; "and, as I said before: What are we going to do ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp

... so much is that she has not had to struggle against a desire; she has simply not felt the need of drink. Further, her sleep continues to be splendid. She is getting more and more calm, in spite of the fact that on several occasions her sang-froid has been severely tested. To put the matter in a nutshell, she is a changed woman. But what impresses me most is the fact that when she took to your method she thought herself at the end of her tether, and in the event of its doing her no good had decided to kill herself (she had already ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks

... very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts; yet hath it all the appertenances of a church of the first magnitude, its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a nutshell. Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel. The minister that divides the word there, must give lumping penny-worths. It is built to the text of two or three assembled in my name. It reminds me of the grain of mustard seed. If the glebe land is proportionate, it may yield ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... is abated. People send to one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox: they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her, with a large needle, (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch) and puts ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... history in a nutshell. But we must be getting near the place, according to what you said at the start. There are the three oaks growing in a clump. Now ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen

... seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose almost never gave him an excuse for it. Of course she was up to her work, but, well, she had better be. This, in a nutshell, was his attitude toward her. Nothing but the undisputable fact that she was up to her work (Gertrude was comforting here, with her reticent but convincing reports of Abe Shuman's satisfaction with her) kept ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... had much of glamour might, Could make a lady seem a knight. The cobwebs on a dungeon wall, Seem tapestry in lordly hall. A nutshell seem a gilded barge, A sheeling seem a palace large, And youth seem age, and age seem youth, All was delusion, nought ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... that followed, the image of the smiling lawyer haunted Carthew's memory. "That three minutes' talk was all the education I ever had worth talking of," says he. "It was all life in a nutshell. Confound it," I thought, "have I got to the point ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the situation in a nutshell:—Nellie doesn't see why she should be keeping up two establishments. It's expensive. The child will be comfortable and happy in the convent and this house will be off ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon

... far put into practice in Germany is, in a nutshell, the decision on the part of the state or the rulers that the individual is not competent to spend his own money, to choose his own calling, to use his own time as he will, or to provide himself for his own future and for the various emergencies of life. And by the minute ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... outlines of this solution, and every hour which has passed has only sufficed, to strengthen a conviction which was already so deeply rooted as to be beyond the reach of hostile argument. What is now required to be done may be stated in a nutshell. Let the Government withdraw the present Home Rule Bill. They will thus dispose at once of the opposition of Mr. BONAR LAW, Sir EDWARD CARSON, Mr. J. L. GARVIN and Mr. WILLIAM O'BRIEN, and will provide themselves ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various

... since I wrote those lines. When they were written the hole which Jim Carpenter had burned with his battery of infra-red lamps through the heaviside layer, that hollow sphere of invisible semi-plastic organic matter which encloses the world as a nutshell does a kernel, was gradually filling in as he had predicted it would: every one thought that in another ten years the world would be safely enclosed again in its protective layer as it had been since the dawn ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... have had to tell it in a nutshell, space growing limited. Philip Hamlyn had ascertained it all beyond possibility of dispute, had seen Mrs. O'Connett, and had brought down the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various

... in a nutshell, or rather an apple-skin. We have clerical authority for affirming that all its miseries were let loose upon the human race by "them greenins" tempting our mother to curious pomological speculations; and from that time till now—Longfellow, thou reasonest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... that if there is such a trait as they describe, it is not due to a deficiently developed but on the contrary to a superlatively developed personality, which might better be called super-personality. To state the position here advocated in a nutshell, it is maintained that the asserted "impersonality" of the Japanese is the result of the communalistic nature of the social order which has prevailed down to the most recent times; it has put its stamp on every feature of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... realize this situation perfectly well. One of the best-known Hindu gentlemen recently wrote as follows: "The truth is in a nutshell and may be described in a few words. The British cannot be driven out of India by the Indians, nor by any foreign Power. This fact is known to more than 90 per cent of the people. Of all the foreigners, the British are the best. We, as we are now, are the least able to govern India, being not equal ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... the remarkable systems of worlds that revolve around Sirius. It is a veritable medley of planets, large and small, inhabited and barren, sinless, sinful and millennial. A little universe packed in a nutshell, ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... the new constitution to work, in the winter of 1791-92. It was soon found out that Mirabeau had been right when he said that for a monarchy it was too democratic, and for a republic there was a king too much. This was Burke's Reflections in a nutshell. But it was foreign intervention that finally ruined the king, and destroyed the hope of an orderly issue. Frederick the Great had set the first example of what some call iniquity and violence in Europe, and others in milder terms call a readjustment of the equilibrium of ...
— Burke • John Morley

... schooled herself to this meeting for Dick's sake, and to please him; she could not, however, pretend to any pleasure in the prospect. It was only natural that she should view Joan with distrust. Dick had allowed himself to become entangled; all unknowingly Mother had expressed the matter in a nutshell. ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson

... waved his spoon around in a wide sweep to indicate the comprehensive nature of that class of responsibilities which render people responsible, and several exclaimed, admiringly, "He is right!—he has put that whole tangled thing into a nutshell—it is wonderful!" After a little pause to give the interest opportunity to gather and grow, he went on: "Very good. Let us suppose the case of a pair of tongs that falls upon a man's foot, causing a cruel hurt. Will you claim that ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain

... stand guard in the corridor. Once in awhile you will go out upon the balcony and take a look. You see, I am afraid of someone. Oh, Baldos, what's the use of my trifling like this? You are to escape from Edelweiss to-night. That is the whole plan—the whole idea in a nutshell. Don't look like that. Don't you want to go?" Now ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... to take Colonel Corkran's place on the Candace as conductor. And I want you and your friend Fenton to go up Nile in charge of the splendid steam dahabeah I've bought to supplement the Mediterranean trip. There you have my motives in a nutshell!" ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... the ground we had three or four days at Ravenna—which is the most interesting deadly lively sepulchre of a place I was ever in in my life. The evolution of modern from ancient art is all there in a nutshell... ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... in a nutshell and depends entirely upon whether Lance continues true to his love or not. If he remains true, your scheme for parting them will have but little effect; if he prove false, why then all will be well, according to your way ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay

... the beginning to me of an interest apart from that which had brought me to King's Cobb. A real nutshell drama had usurped the place of that fictitious one that had as yet failed to mark an epoch by so much as a scratch. I accepted the former as some solace for the intolerable wrong inflicted upon me by the sea and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... ever were, and we're healthier on top of it. We've been brought up different, that's all. We've lived in cities all our lives. We know the city sounds and thugs, but we don't know the country ones. Our training has been unnatural, that's the whole thing in a nutshell. Now we're going in for natural training. Give us a little time, and we'll sleep as sound out of doors as ever your father ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... Sir Edward Grey tell the whole story in a nutshell. Austria believed, rightly or wrongly, that it was a question of life or death for her, while Russia claimed the right of preventing Austria from becoming the predominate power in the Balkans, and actually threatened war. Russia did not claim to be concerned with the justice ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... Mabel languidly. "Anglo-American patriotism, crystallized in a nutshell, I suppose! I'm not going to ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... the soul; we feel that we have wider thoughts than we knew; the soul has been living, as it were, in a nutshell, all unaware of its own power, and now suddenly finds freedom in the sun and the sky. Straight, as if sawn down from turf to beach, the cliff shuts off the human world, for the sea knows no time and no era; you ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... in a nutshell, to come right down to business," said the former bully of Putnam Hall coolly. "You are our prisoners, and you can't get away, no matter how hard you try. Captain Villaire and his men, as well as myself, are in this ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield

... Now, if anything were to happen to me in the ordinary course of business, by the time my debts are paid there would be nothing left to support my son Harry whilst he was getting in the way of earning a living, whereas now he will be set up for five years. There is the whole affair in a nutshell." ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard

... Parliament, so that no temporary, pettifogging half-measure may slip into a thin house—like a weasel into an empty barn—and so obstruct for many years legislation upon durable principle. The thing lies in a nutshell. The Legislature has been entrapped. It never intended to outlaw women in the matter. The persons who have outlawed them are all subjects, and the engines of outlawry have been "certificates of attendance on lectures," and "public ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... perceiving her to be a lady, he went away. Lying down again, she thought: 'People will worry them until they sting, and then kill them; it's so unreasonable,' not knowing that she was putting all her thoughts on suffering in a single nutshell. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... and she would have cracked like a nutshell against those adamantine walls. But to get into the harbour it was the only way, and as the skipper said afterwards, when I remonstrated on his apparent foolhardiness, "Needs must, when the ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... Yes, it would be delightful to be on board Flying Fish now. However, no doubt Algie Thynne—(how eloquently, by the way, you describe him! putting all the complications of his character and the dazzling charm of his personality in a nutshell by the simple sentence 'He's rather a nut!')—amply compensates for my absence. You ask if I know him. I do, though perhaps more by reputation than anything else. We have met once or twice. Where? ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... she has been in the city, I believe they have met—though not in recent years. My private suspicion is that she has never entirely got over being in love with him. Anyhow, there's their general relationship in a nutshell—parted but friendly. It might have stayed just like that till they were both in their graves, but for one accidental complication. There is ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... Sir Lionel Barton," he said abruptly; "and, to put the whole thing in a nutshell, he has laughed at me! During the months that I have been wondering where he had gone to he has been somewhere in Egypt. He certainly bears a charmed life, for on the evidence of his letter to The Times he has seen things in Tibet ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... not yet fulfilled his part in the great contract. The matter lies in a nutshell. The men who enter the Church are sufficiently intelligent and well educated to appreciate the advantages of Christian democracy, fellowship, solidarity, and brotherly love. The republic of the Church has therefore survived, and will ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... bare arms, Jorgenson, who would be watching the entrance of the creek ever since a muffled detonation of a gun to seaward had warned him of the brig's arrival on the Shore of Refuge, would mutter to himself—"Here's Tom coming in his nutshell." And indeed she was in shape somewhat like half a nutshell and also in the colour of her dark varnished planks. The man's shoulders and head rose high above her gunwales; loaded with Lingard's heavy frame she would climb sturdily the steep ridges, slide squatting into the hollows ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... furnished—to suggest, in your examination of her today. And so, sir, I wish to tell you this. I acted as legal adviser to the late Mr. Kitely. I made his will. I have that will in this bag. And—to put matters in a nutshell, Mr. Brereton—there is not a living soul in this world who knows the contents of that will but—your humble ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher

... ever wont to read into the great waves of chance, as here and there a ripple from them sets their own little vessels shaking, as here and there some splash of foam, a puff of wind, strikes the nutshell which floats their lives, a personal, deliberate intervention, an event designed by the Everlasting to test their powers, ripen their characters, equip their souls ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... the whole story in a nutshell. For his experiments in septic poisons, Mr. Arcubus had hired this apartment, with its convenient balcony for the cultivation of his antidotes. Having prepared his decoctions, he had this night caused himself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... In a nutshell, then, what the advertising department needs is that great body of non-subscribing suffragists to enroll as readers. Think of that 68,000 whose names and addresses we have! If we only had them on our lists, if they ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Look Forward and Back at the Woman's Journal, the Organ of the - Woman's Movement • Agnes E. Ryan

... lies in a nutshell, my dear. Oh, how glad I am that you take it so quietly. Then, perhaps it is all a mistake, arising from your hearty manner to every one. I told him so, and said that he need not scruple visiting you, or be in ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... edocasion. mi deerest deere it brakes my art all from yu for tu part, i rot them lines this marnin. mister tomas sais as i gov im mi prumass befor i cum to ave the apiness of see yu. butt i dant thinc i giv mor promass to him. nor 2 manni uthers. mi deerest deer and troo luv cuppid! i feer our nutshell song is blitid and its ros kwencht in its blum. them was plesent ours when the carnashuns and tullups was all in blo, wasunt them mi deer luv. mister tomas sais ass he can mari me in a munth and father sais i hot tu take im. iff so be as yu caun't du it beefor i thinc ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various

... labor. While he was translating Homer, he says: "As soon as breakfast is over, I retire to my nutshell of a summer-house, which is my verse manufactory, and here I abide seldom less than three hours, and not often more." This little summer-house, which he called his boudoir, was not much bigger than a sedan-chair; the door of it opened into the garden, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... general question into a nutshell, gave the utmost satisfaction, and brought the gentleman into great notice until the ladies retired. After that, I observed that Mr. Gulpidge and Mr. Henry Spiker, who had hitherto been very distant, entered into ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... education, morality, sanity; yet "white males" vote without these, and women possessing all are denied the right. While different men have different duties, different functions, different spheres, ranging from the heights of Parnassus to the bowels of the earth, why legislate all women into a nutshell? Because a man is a father, must he needs be nothing else? Are lawyers, merchants, tailors, cobblers, bootblacks less skilled in their specialties because they vote? Because some women are mothers, shall all women concentrate every thought in that direction? and can those who are mothers be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... by Xenophon, put my case in a nutshell. When a friend complained to Socrates that a man whom he had saluted had not saluted him in return, the father of philosophy replied: "It is an odd thing that if you had met a man ill-conditioned in body you would not have been angry; ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... of Argyll once said of him at a public meeting: "Oh, gentlemen, what a comfort it is to have a leader who says what he means and means you to understand what he says." Here in a nutshell was the quality which the country most admired in the Duke of Devonshire. They always knew exactly what he stood for, and whether he was a Unionist or a Home-ruler, a Free-trader or a Protectionist. He was never seeking for a safe point to rest on, one which, in ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... Documents? What Fact lying in them was it that Friedrich had to read? Here, smelted down by repeated roastings, is succinct answer;—for the ultimate fragment of incombustible here as elsewhere, will go into a nutshell, once the continents of Diplomatist-Gazetteer logic and disorderly stable-litter, threatening to heap themselves over the very stars, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... difficulty, in a "nutshell," was that the commanding officer of the district was furnished no more troops or supplies for this state of war than had been provided and furnished him for a state ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... up again. It was on this second dash that I understood why those Homeric words had come to my lips a while ago. This was indeed like nothing so much as like being out on rough waters and in a troubled sea, with nothing to brace the storm with but a wind-tossed nutshell of a one-man sailing craft. I knew that experience for having outridden many a gale in the mouth of the mighty St. Lawrence River. When the snow reached its extreme in depth, it gave you the feeling which a drowning man may have when fighting his desperate fight ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... the gloom was in me, and the glory was mine also, and he went not out of my cave. The stars and the shining of heaven were illusions of the infinite I wove about him. I captured his soul with the shadow of space; a nutshell would have contained the film. I smote on the dim heart-chords the manifold music of being. God is sweeter in the human than the human in God. Therefore he ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... 1947-48 numbers of "The Nutshell", news bulletin of the NNGA, have been issued by the Secretary's office. It is intended to have this bulletin distributed to members four times a year. It will carry news of the Association's activities, supplementing the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... far as I think best, and then I 'll ask a few of you. The lady upstairs is Viola Henley, the wife of Philip Henley. She has come down here to take legal possession of this property. That is the situation in a nutshell. I am merely accompanying her to make sure that ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... once, by contact, put in communication with one another, so as to become what magnetizers call en rapport the one with the other, continue ever after to sympathize, no matter what space may divide them. 'T is in a nutshell, you perceive,—and giving me the entire principle of an unlimited telegraphic communication. All that was to do was to systematize it. Tedious work, you may conceive, Monsieur; yet I did not shrink from it, nor find it irksome, for my assured result was ever leading me onward. Ah, bah! ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... lord, from the sight of these noisy geese of the Capitol, whose brains put together would not fill a nutshell," retorted Chilo. "O first-born of Apollo, I am writing a Greek hymn in thy honor, and I wish to spend a few days in the temple of the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... situation in a nutshell, as it were, he put his hands in his pockets and observed Frank covertly out of the corners of his eyes. Seeing how crestfallen he looked, the tramp ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton

... photoplay company. If he can be interested in your story, the script is half sold. This being true, it follows that your synopsis must be clear, interesting, and as brief as you can possibly make it, while still giving all the important points of the story. He must grasp your plot, if not in a nutshell, at least in just as few words as it can be compressed into in order to make its development perfectly clear. You must therefore outline it, so that he may be able to see plainly the possibilities of the story as it would work itself out in ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... my lady. Well, here it is in a nutshell: I have not spoken of it before, but you and Mr. Browne can very easily comply with the provisions of the will. You can be married at ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... others are angry because I ever got a loop at all. They're all angry because I managed to step in and do the things that they should have done long before. I came here—and that's the whole story in a nutshell. I've had to have the city council with me to be able to do anything at all, and because I managed to make it friendly and keep it so they've turned on me in that section and gone into politics. I ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... slunk into a nutshell. Percival, with very languid interest, glanced over the volume. But despite his mood, and his moderate affection for political writings, the passage he opened upon struck and seized him unawares. Though the sneer of the ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... situation in a nutshell," went on the Prime Minister. "We are doomed unless succor reaches us from the outside. We have discussed a hundred projects. While we are inactive, Count Marlanx is gaining more power and a greater ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... It is becos I wanted all, neighbors and friends, to be together whilst I made an announcement which will be pleasant hearin' to some parties, and astonishin' to all. I ain't goin' to detain you very long, for what I've got to say might be packed in a nutshell and carried away in the stomick of a tomtit. You all of you know, neighbors and friends all, as how my brother-in-law made a fool of himself, and was made a fool of through the Countess Charlotte. And how that his farm got mortgaged; and since ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... heard no sound during the night. Nothing had been stolen or disarranged, and there is absolutely no explanation of what the horror can be which has frightened a woman to death and two strong men out of their senses. There is the situation, Mr. Holmes, in a nutshell, and if you can help us to clear it up you will have done ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle

... stored crab with clasped knee, Till they had sated their delicious eye: Or search'd the hopeful thicks of hedgy rows, For briary berries, or haws, or sourer sloes: Or when they meant to fare the fin'st of all, They lick'd oak-leaves besprint with honey fall. As for the thrice three-angled beech nutshell, Or chestnut's armed husk, and hide kernel, No squire durst touch, the law would not afford, Kept for the court, and for the king's own board. Their royal plate was clay, or wood, or stone; The ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... a nutshell as big as a man's head and as hard as wood. "The inside was quite spoiled," went on the old seaman, "but so far as I could judge it was no kin to the palm nuts we get. I kept the shell, and I have never found any merchant who could ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... of the Khoi Khoi.' {202b} This book is sometimes appealed to as a crushing argument against the mythologists who adopt the method we have just explained. Let us see if the blow be so very crushing. To put the case in a nutshell, the Hottentots have commonly been described as a race which worshipped a dead chief, or conjurer—Tsui Goab his name is, meaning Wounded Knee, a not unlikely name for a savage. Dr. Hahn, on the other hand, labours to show that the Hottentots originally worshipped no dead chief, but (as ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... carpet, which his brother the wise Galfridus sends him, he will find all the kingdoms of the earth portrayed in it. In short, as much history as was described on the ever-memorable and wonderful piece of silk which the puissant White Cat(868) inclosed in a nutshell, and presented to her paramour Prince. In short, in this carpet, which (filberts being out of season) I was reduced to pack up in a walnut, he will find the following immense library of political lore: Magazines for October, November, December; with an Appendix ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... for Voltaire a pilgrim's cockle dropped in the passes of the Alps. In medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton, who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the patient's neck "in a nutshell lapped in silk"! In chemistry, what strides! In astronomy, what perturbations and changes! In history, what do we not owe to the amiable authors who, dipping their pens in whitewash, have reversed the judgments of ages on Nero and Henry VIII.! In genealogy, what thanks must ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... have it in a nutshell. I tell you what it is, we shall have to exclude all critics from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various

... of Jones's career, and upon which all else in his life merely served as commentary, was scored. Captain Pearson, in his court-martial, which was a formality in the British navy in case of defeat, explained Jones's victory in a nutshell: "It was clearly apparent," he said, "that the American ship was dominated by a commanding will of the most unalterable resolution," and again, "the extraordinary and unheard-of desperate stubbornness of my adversary had so depressed the spirits of my people that, when more than two hundred ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood

... the Pope to negotiate, and many letters were written on either side, but without effect. The difference was said to lie in a nutshell; but where the liberties of the Church were concerned, Becket was inflexible. At the Epiphany, 1169, he was put to a severe trial; Henry himself, who had long been at war with Louis le Jeune, came to Montmirail, to hold a conference and sign a treaty, and he was summoned ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning. It may be said to gather up Browning's philosophy of life in a nutshell. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... in a nutshell. He had done nothing carelessly; he was touching off our conflict with flashes of genius. He was the man who had roused in me last night the fiercest passions of my life, and yet this morning he had saved me from death, and, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... proportionably magnify'd to what this seed of Tyme is, it would make it appear as bigg as a large Hay-reek and it would be no great wonder to see Homers Iliads, and Homer and all, cramm'd into such a Nutshell. We may perceive even in these small Grains, as well as in greater, how curious and carefull Nature is in preserving the seminal principle of Vegetable bodies, in what delicate, strong and most convenient Cabinets she lays them and closes ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely. There is the science of the organization of armies in a nutshell. ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... where corpses were cremated, and on the other side a second tomb, also decorated with painted stucco-work. Here was found a piece of agate in the shape of a nut, so beautifully carved that it was mistaken for a real nutshell. There was also a skeleton, the skull of which was found between the legs, and in its place there was a mask or plaster cast of the head, reproducing most vividly the features of the dead man. The cast is now ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... it; and man is the only animal who has been silly and wrong-headed enough to stumble into it. The explanation and the remedy are so simple, so close at hand, that we have not seen them. The whole thing lies in a nutshell. Where does this abnormal, uncomfortable period come in? Between childhood, we say, and maturity; it is the transition from one to the other. When human beings, then, are neither boys nor men, girls ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... back to the Government. Look here, Luscombe,' and evidently he had forgotten the difference in our ranks, 'let me put the case into a nutshell. I was sent over here, to France, in a hurry. Never mind how I found out what I am going to tell you,—it is a fact. Two battalions of ours were urgently ordered here; our men here were hardly pressed, the ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking

... sister.... Confound it, don't cut us off yet. What does it matter so long as the messages are paid for? Nobody else wants the line. Well, I may for an hour more.... Are you there? Very sorry; it's the fault of the Post Office people. Here is the plot in a nutshell. Your sister has lost a diamond star. She gives a minute description of it to the police, and drops a hint to the effect that she believes it was taken away by mistake—in other words, was stolen—from her in London by a chance ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... after that advisable, he despatched Mr. Dolby to America for the purpose of surveying the proposed scene of operations. Immediately on his emissary's return, Dickens drew up a few pithy sentences, headed by him, "The Case in a Nutshell." His decision was what those more immediately about him had for some time anticipated. He made up his mind to go, and to go quite independently. The Messrs. Chappell, it should be remarked at once, had no part whatever in the enterprise. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... of eager faces that gazed over the side of the "Trident." Yet there were many hearts there that grew faint and chill when they beheld the little white speck that seemed to be their only hope of rescue in that dark hour. "What hope was there that such a nutshell should save them all?" they thought, perchance, on seeing it approach. They little knew the wonderful vitality of ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne

... choose his own religion and to determine for himself matters of faith. The position which Luther occupies in his final answer before the Emperor at Worms is generally believed to state Luther's position on the question of religious liberty in a nutshell. "Unless convinced by the Word of God or by cogent reason" that he was wrong, he declared at the Diet of Worms, he could not and would not retract what he had written. The individual conscience, he maintained, cannot be bound. Each ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... nutshell; it is this:—Shall man submit to the revealed will of God, or to his own will? That is the naked question when the fog of confused ideas and unmeaning words is lifted ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.

... little minx was up to, until she said we could go on the same steamer that took the baseball party. Lots of other women—wives of the managers and players and so on—will go along, I understand. So there's the whole bally story in a nutshell. Rippin' ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... attached to them on account of the importance which every man naturally bestows on matters of that sort; what among other nations forms a complicated code of morality more or less pure, more or less corrupt, for the nations of which we speak becomes compressed, so to speak, in a nutshell, and, the essence remaining always at the bottom, the idea of duty grows paramount in their minds and hearts, and every thing they do is illumined by that light of the human conscience, which, after all, is for each one of us the voice of God. False issues do not distract their minds, and give a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... us about the good little girl who saved a cat from being drowned by some bad boys, and carried her home? and she turned out to be a fairy cat and gave that girl every thing she wished for—cakes and candy, and a lovely pink silk frock packed in a nutshell for her to wear to ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... eyes—the home. The long winters, the stubborn rains, the humidity, the continual changes in the climate, compel the Hollander to spend a great part of the year and of the day in the house. He loves his little home, his nutshell, much more than we love our houses, because it is much more necessary to him, and he lives in it much more; he provides it with every comfort, caresses it, adorns it; he delights in looking at the falling snow and drenching rain from its tight windows, and ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... we were moving on this immense and turbid ocean, carrying within her the great central fire by which the engine was moved, which, in spite of winds and waves, carried us safely along; then the science which enabled the master of this curious nutshell of man's contriving to know just in what part of this waste of trackless waters we were. All these things I knew before, and had often thought of them, but was never so impressed with them; it was almost as if they were ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen

... in the classroom. If her sister is a mistress, she is a pupil, and therefore bound to side with her Form through all those trials of tact known as 'thick and thin'. Have I not put the thing in a nutshell, O ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... our lot who would give me the lie!... To behave like that is treachery!... You have betrayed the Numbers. There it is in a nutshell!... What have you to ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... that I can be quick." Tabs spoke leisurely. He paused, trying to think what he should say next. "Here it is in a nutshell. Mrs. Lockwood, as we both know, is a more than ordinarily charming woman. She's the kind who, without being able to prevent herself, draws men. There are women like that. Her three marriages, all taking place so close together gave her a reputation—— You're a man ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... that every farmer and farmer's family in the land could read "The Story of the Soil," for it gives in a nutshell the results of years of patient study and investigation upon the most vital question that now confronts the farmer: How shall he conserve his soil? I have read it with great pleasure and profit.—FRED L. HATCH, ...
— The Farm That Won't Wear Out • Cyril G. Hopkins

... girl of her sort can long resist. I propose that you make desperate love to Louise Merrick and so cut Arthur Weldon out of the deal entirely. My part of the comedy will be to attract him to my side again. Now you have the entire proposition in a nutshell." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne



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