What does “precious little room to manoeuvre” mean here?
From case to case, high marks go to the diplomats who were part of the American Revolution whose realism compelled them to think and act in terms of power, rightfully eschewing ideology and moral principles. When there was little room to hand to maneuver there was a constant fear of failure.
What mean that they had very little room in which to manoeuvre
and a very small hand held hand.
Idioms. The Freedictionary. What is precious few
and also
precious little? So very few, very little – very few leaves on the trees or We have precious little fuel left. In these idioms precious serves as an intensive, a colloquial usage dating from the first half of the 1800s.
Had little room to move around and had nothing to escape.