The rest of the players perform with admirable insight and vigor.
With admirable candour and insight, the four men - for the first time - take us inside that closely-guarded world.
Lucian calls Aspasia a "model of wisdom", "the admired of the admirable Olympian" and lauds "her political knowledge and insight, her shrewdness and penetration".
When things go well, we are the beneficiaries of our mentors' best selves, not just their admirable writing but the prescient insights that divine talent in us before we know it's there ourselves.
This is unexpected and admirable, and though moments of genuine insight come rarely, he does make a good show of giving it his best shot.
But while his restless search for the original insight and the novel description is admirable and often bracingly enjoyable, it can sometimes produce prose of such dense richness that it's almost impossible to digest.
O'Connor does an admirable job of bringing the reader into the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, and giving insight into the mindset of a public curious about the new, terrifying "monsters" being unearthed by geologists.
