be near to bone
be close to the bone

These areas are close to the bone of national economic policy making.

For Mr. Lodge himself, the accusation is close to the bone.

A dislocated bone may also damage blood vessels, nerves, ligaments, tendons, and muscles that are close to the bone.

"It is closer to the bone," Mr. Cheney said over tea in his Upper East Side apartment.

"I'm not at all persuaded that race is closer to the bone in the South," said John Hope Franklin, a historian at Duke University.

His page-turning yarns are not works of fantasy or science fiction: they are close to the bone of counter-espionage, warts and all, as recent revelations from Libya have shown.

Belgians are devoted to creature comforts rather than to ideology, but politics have always been close to the bone, inherent in which language is spoken, the church attended, even the pension awarded on retirement.

WHITE STONE DAY While Cream dislikes correspondents as a general rule, his loathing for Whitty is closer to the bone.

Though Thompson Twins' previous album, 1987's Close to the Bone, was also a flop, both singles taken from it--"Get That Love" and "Long Goodbye"--are included here.

The reason the album is closer to the bone is that for the first time in years we had taken a break from the music business and we actually had real experiences that we wanted to write about.

Government money was available, there was a need for books with minority protagonists, and perhaps most important there was a generation of librarians and teachers open to stories that were closer to the bone of contemporary teenagers' real lives.

The feathers are closest to the bone on the skull and end of the tail, where little to no muscle was present, and the gap increases over the back vertebrae, where more musculature would be expected, indicating that the filaments were external to the skin and do not correspond with subcutaneous structures.