Example sentences of "be at best [art] [noun sg] " in BNC.
Next page| No | Sentence |
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| 1 | The Prince Napoleon-Jerome had from the inauguration of the Empire been a constant , and public , critic of his cousin 's policies , proving himself to be at best an embarrassment , at worst a threat to the regime . |
| 2 | Clearly such arrangements were not ideal — they could be exhausting for children and were at best a compromise among the law , the need for education , and the reality of poverty . |
| 3 | The janissaries , who were once the elite corps of the sultan 's army , had degenerated by the end of the eighteenth century into an unruly and lawless rabble , who were at best an embarrassment and at worst a threat to their rulers . |
| 4 | For most of the leaders among the Owenites the distinction only showed itself in their recognition that the Bill had done nothing for working people ; that since the prime need , as they saw it , was to act directly to remove the evils of a system which grievously oppressed the lives of working people , the Bill had been at best an irrelevance , at worst a distraction . |
| 5 | It is at best a standstill and does not measure up to the problems of dereliction and rising unemployment . |
| 6 | There are numerous difficulties in making an historical study which depends entirely on written evidence , which may not represent the experience of the mass of children , and is at best a distillation of the views of the literate classes . |
| 7 | But a track record of success is at best a measure of past management expertise in fair times . |
| 8 | This is so , because economics is at best a technique that is both partial and complementary to other disciplines . |
| 9 | Like the legendary biographies of the Romantic poets , realism is at best a by-product of art and not its raison d'être . |
| 10 | When Springhall writes that adolescents gave their allegiance to ‘ society ’ , this is at best a half-truth . |
| 11 | … one can not begin to understand a number of contemporary English novelists unless one realises that to them Joyce 's way is at best a cul-de-sac . |
| 12 | The over-used saying ( sometimes incorrectly attributed to Confucius ) that ‘ one picture is worth more than ten thousand words ’ ( see Stevenson , 1948 , for its actual derivation ) is at best a half truth . |
| 13 | It emerges from the above discussion that man-machine allocation of function is at best an oversimplification and it may lead to the neglect of some key features of human performance . |
| 14 | It is at best an outline of the main points in a rather complex field . |
| 15 | Lewis was subtle enough to see that this was at best a half-truth , and perhaps he was beginning to sense that what Tolkien 's friendship had to offer him was something rather more important than a regress to me nursery . |
| 16 | I told myself that my intention was maintenance of the status quo , but this was at best a half-truth . |
| 17 | More likely it was the knowledge that , for all Dysart 's manifest charm and proven ability , he had a wife who was at best an adulteress , at worst a traitor ; either Minter 's dupe or his co-conspirator . |