The late, libidinous, Alan Clarke's Diaries tell you more than any academic study about the reality of politics, about the relationship between politicians and civil servants, the way individuals exploit power, and the way the apparently powerful strive to achieve within the structures and constraints in which they operate.
At the end of her lecture or radio interview, you were a little more aware of the reformers' struggle as they faced attacks by powerful groups "striving to restore the old economic and political system" and which sought to exploit the "ordinary Russians' nostalgia for communist times".She knew these times as well as any Russian.
Coupling the most renowned football club in the world and the world's largest organization working for children will mean a powerful team striving to improve the well-being of children.
It can be quite useful, then, to educators pursuing either of these aims, or especially powerful when they are striving to accomplish both.
It is a strategy pursued by many powerful nations as they strive to influence, rather than alienate, ideologically wayward but strategically important leaders and countries.
This was the finding of a recent study by a group of female academics at Harvard Business School, which found that women have more overall life goals than men, but are less likely to strive for powerful jobs, and are more likely to anticipate negative outcomes from potential promotion.
Those who strive only to enhance the power, wealth, and privilege of the most powerful, wealthy, and privileged now strive to abrogate that part of the contract which does not serve their narrowly conceived interests.
[Detroit is] shadowed and striving, grim and powerful.
In the work of some photographers this uniformity might provoke tedium; in Strand's there is the powerful sense of an artist striving to bring reality into harmony with the purity of his vision.
To a reader in a country where resignation is a national pastime, a country where the standard childhood training lists "showing off" as the worst sin of all, a country whose church, family and education systems used once to ring with the hurled accusation, "Who do you think you are - someone special?", this encouragement to strive nonetheless was powerful stuff.
