Idiomatic Prepositions — On the Verge / Brink / Cusp Of (C2)

Throughout the closing minutes of her testimony she appeared to be ___ tears, but she nevertheless managed to complete her statement to the panel's evident satisfaction.

For nearly forty-eight hours in late October the two states appeared to be ___ open military conflict, before the back-channel intervention of a third party produced an unexpected de-escalation.

At thirty-four, with two well-received exhibitions in Berlin already behind her, she appeared to most observers to be ___ a quite spectacular international breakthrough.

She was ___ posting a thoroughly intemperate reply to the article when the editor herself fortunately rang to suggest a quieter, off-the-record discussion of the underlying complaint.

Many of those leaving the auditorium afterwards remarked that the keynote had reminded them they were ___ a quite new era for scholarly publishing, and that no one was wholly sure of the rules.

It was, by the most extraordinary of accidents, ___ the country's long-anticipated independence vote that the second of the two leaked memoranda finally found its way into the hands of the morning broadsheets.

By the third overnight shift of the week, a sizeable proportion of the junior nurses on the rota were quite clearly working ___ complete physical exhaustion.

A particularly comprehensive review published in last week's Science finds that nearly a third of all amphibian species native to the country are now ___ extinction.

There has been a quiet consensus among veteran political correspondents this autumn that the formerly obscure backbencher is now genuinely ___ something resembling national prominence.

The senior partner was, by his own subsequent admission, ___ telling the prospective client to take her case elsewhere when the firm's newest associate quietly intervened with a quite different proposal.

___ the original moon landing in July 1969, NASA's public-affairs office took the rather unusual step of releasing a detailed contingency statement for use in the event of catastrophic failure.

The novel's seventeen-year-old narrator, ___ adulthood and the corresponding loss of certain childish illusions, spends much of the long summer cataloguing his grievances against the world.

Although there is a strong tradition in his own field of declaring that one is ___ a breakthrough, it is now widely acknowledged within the wider research community that this particular announcement may turn out to be substantive.

The smaller of the two banks is, for the third time in as many years, reportedly ___ formal regulatory intervention, and the supervisor's response over the coming fortnight will be closely watched in the City.

Two of the central characters spend most of the second act ___ a kind of nervous breakdown, although the playwright is careful never quite to let either of them tip over into the breakdown itself.