Leading strings

Here, you might have seen one, who, after ineffectually endeavouring to persuade a surly porker to be conducted in leading strings, was obliged at last to seize the perverse animal in his arms, and carry him struggling against his naked breast, and squealing without intermission.

Bureaucracy holds all things and the administration itself in leading strings; it stifles men of talent who are bold enough to be independent of it or to enlighten it on its own follies.

" 'My friend,' he said, as soon as he surmised that I should break away altogether from my leading strings, unless he relaxed them,

Gardner had the CBSO playing out of the palm of his hand, Zoe Beyers (how lovely to see her back) leading strings which so often evoked the soundworld of the composer's Aida, flutes swaying like seraphims, and heavy brass, including Graham Sibley's splendid cimbasso (should have been an ophicleide, really) portentously strident.

And before the great, good-natured public is aware, it has been placed in leading strings, its rights circumscribed and its natural privileges abolished.

Increasingly, as he traces the growth of political tension in 1641, the Junto's objectives become 'Venetianization', creating a 'Dogelike' monarch, or a 'monarchical republic with a king in leading strings' to a Council of peers.

"All would have been well still, they argue, had the frustration of the elite not been 'reinforced by a new and much more explosive frustration, if not quite of the masses, of a vast new class of individuals emancipated or seeking emancipation, from the leading strings of the traditional communal order of society'.

Ecker explains Christa Wolfs attempts to free herself from the leading strings of 'that stem governess, the State' by devising her own 'private poetic' as a means to 'subjective authenticity'; Georgina Paul discusses the changes which took place in narrative theory in the GDR, up to and after the time of reunification.

forces threatened China strengthened Mao's conviction that the sooner he could free himself from Soviet leading strings the better off he would be.

Cradles and corsets, long petticoats and leading strings, perambulators and pantaloons all serve to delineate children themselves as Calvert's ultimate artifacts, constituted and reconstituted in successive phases of the American psyche from 1600 to 1900.

Clive, who was now effectively master of Bengal, skilfully bolstered Mir Jafar's apparent authority while keeping him on leading strings. The skirmish at Plassey was critical to the East India Company's triumph over its French rivals and, in the longer term, to the establishment of British rule in India.