Today, however, a politically heterodox cadre of academics is arguing that singleness — and, particularly, single parenthood — is one of poverty's primary causes, for which matrimony might be a plausible tonic.
But Wilson's singleness of purpose was in doubt.
The nest first built now contains four young ones, nearly fledged, and the owners of the last are engaged in incubation; but the poor female remains in all the misery of singleness, scarcely daring to leave her house, lest it should be demolished before her return.
This would entail fundamental change to the "singleness and unity" of the British system, as Walter Bagehot described it, that will not be made for backbench committees.Their cheerleaders also underestimate the extent to which Parliament's assertiveness is tactical.
The imagination that conceived it was her own, but behind it was the same energy and singleness of purpose that drove all her family's ventures.Outside in the churchyard is a rough stone box, a mausoleum that contemporaries called Druidic, Cyclopean, even "Archaean", designed by Sarah to commemorate her beloved sister.
In spite of such severe restrictions, the great 17th-century French dramatists Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, confining the crises of their characters' lives to a single setting and a brief span of hours, produced a unique form of tragedy that derives its austere power from its singleness of concentration.
This was a guy I'd just met and yet he thought my singleness meant my legs would ping open as soon as he bought me a drink.
Conscious of the spiritual significance of the natural world, young painters should "go to Nature in all singleness of heart…having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing".
They moved fast, and with a singleness of purpose that astonished all the outside executives I consulted.
That is no mean affair; the only thing that separates the writer from ordinary folk — and, far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, it can redouble the force of solitude, "one's ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness" — is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a Crucifixion, becomes an event.
Alexandra Roach, the actress who plays young Margaret, has a slight overbite and staring blue eyes that suggest an unnerving singleness of purpose.
