In a nutshell Neutral

To express something in the fewest possible words, giving only the essential core of a longer story or explanation.

It’s typically used to introduce a quick summary, signaling that a more complicated situation is about to be boiled down to its essence.

The phrase’s most-cited backstory comes from the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History” (77 CE), which claims that Cicero once reported seeing a copy of Homer’s “Iliad” written in text so small it could fit inside an actual nutshell. Modern commentators consider this claim almost certainly exaggerated or garbled in transmission — the “Iliad” runs to roughly 700 pages in modern editions, making genuine nutshell-sized miniaturization implausible with ancient writing technology. Shakespeare alluded to the same idea of extreme compression in “Hamlet” (“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space”), but the specific figurative meaning of “stated concisely” is a much later development, first clearly documented in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1841 “The Second Funeral of Napoleon”: “Here, then, in a nutshell, you have the whole matter.”

In a nutshell, the project was a success.

Can you explain it in a nutshell?

In a nutshell, we need more time and more funding.

A: “What happened at the meeting?” B: “In a nutshell, we got the approval.”