3 Metaphors for foothold

But if he had been the most ordinary of youths, a bachelor's foothold on the dance-lists is the easiest thing in the world to obtain.

Nearest to them in temper is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science and doubt and faith.

We did not wish your people, monsieur, to have any foothold in South Africa, for history has taught us that the British foothold of one half-century is the British Empire of the next.

3 Metaphors for  foothold