But watching the often admirable Sascha Radetsky forcing himself rigidly through this twaddle made me miserable.
Michelle Obama and Jill Biden have led an admirable program called Joining Forces to help connect veterans with jobs and other resources.
The argument as I read it is simply that Mr McCain's experience in the armed forces, though admirable, is not of the sort that's relevant to national securiy policymaking.
The clarity with which Crane lays out the action of these deep cultural forces is admirable, and the sense of crushing inevitability that the cult of man-hauling gave to Scott's final demise is palpable.
Marion has approached Robert for help because she needs the advice, she says, of "someone of my own sort" - and, indeed, what draws him so swiftly and so surely on to her side are the little signals of decency he identifies in her and her mother: their elegant, if shabby, furniture; the fact that they insist on serving "admirable" sherry despite being forced into other economies.
A message from the Queen to mark the event praised the men and women of the forces as "admirable examples of professionalism and courage".
Philip Toynbee, writing in the Observer a few days later, called it "a series of brilliant descriptive sketches … a genuine tour de force, and the admirable photographs of the local countryside and its inhabitants match and illuminate the text with an unusual degree of sympathetic understanding".
Even if he had got it, there is no denying that Obama had long been reluctant to intervene in Syria's civil war by force – for the admirable reason that he could see all the same perils pointed out by his opponents.
The Tavistock clinic, (spiritual) home to some of the country's most achieved, admirable psychotherapists, was a driving force behind the Family Nurse Partnership, and still sees the dovetailed aims of the First Three Years movement and their own as a welcome consensus.
Our resilience and strength is admirable despite the inequality and misogyny that we are forced to deal with.
