explain away

• “There was only one London newspaper, the Westminster Gazette, which made even a faint-hearted attempt to explain away the President's statement.”

  The Life and Letters of Walter H Page

• “No engineer had ever come to a Monday morning meeting to explain away a SRB ground-test failure.”

  Simon & Schuster: Riding Rockets

• “Pelagius, having won the good-will of the assembly by reading to them some private letters of prominent bishops among them one of Augustine (Ep. cxlvi) - began to explain away and disprove the various accusations.”

  The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 11: New Mexico-Philip

• “After vainly trying to explain away some of the errors brought home to him by Froude, and leaving others unnoticed, he complains, with deep and obvious sincerity, that Froude had not read his books, nor even his articles in Encyclopaedias.”

  The Life of Froude

• “Any theory which denies this great and precious truth, and which would explain away this love as merely indiscriminate benevolence or philanthropy which had all men for its objects, many of whom are allowed to perish, must be un-Scriptural.”

  The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination

• “Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre's claim, Tito's thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment.”

  George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy

• “Molly would explain away weakness in blame-free psychological jargon.”

  Firestorm

• “And even though she knew in her heart of hearts that these guys must be into historical reenactments—mid-eighteenth-century by the look of the jackets—she was in no rush to explain away what she saw.”

  Simon & Schuster: THE TIME QUAKE

• “Gentle hands stroked and soothed up and down her shaking back while she apologised, shuddering hiccups causing interesting sensations in their still-joined bodies as she sought to explain away her foolish tears without embarrassing either of them with rash declarations of love, and spoiling what should be a perfect moment of post-coital bliss.”

  Mistress For A Weekend

• “Stretching matters, superpsi can be invoked to explain away the best afterlife evidence; but you can just as easily stretch in the opposite direction, and see survival of death as expressing the limit of psychic capacity.”

  Simon & Schuster: Experiencing the Next World Now

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