The baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, familiar in the role of Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera, was his typical imposing self: so imposing that his meltdown in the end, as a belatedly enlightened (or at least intensely lonely) Onegin, may have strained credulity a bit.
They said he ended up doing belatedly and publicly what he could have done much earlier and more quietly: pressuring Meretz and capitulating to Shas's demands.
Groups and individuals invested in the proposition that the surge "worked" — many members of the officer corps, most Republicans and virtually all neoconservatives — will welcome "The Endgame" as an account sustaining their conviction that the Iraq war, however belatedly, ended up in the win column.
France's tragedy under Mr Hollande has been to waste two years implementing a zig-zagging economic policy: first he imposed heavy tax increases across the board and promised to end austerity, then he belatedly began to curb public spending, bring down taxes and support private enterprise instead.
Compulsory summer school was belatedly introduced to end "social promotion", whereby pupils automatically rise a grade each year even if they have not met adequate educational levels.
The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has belatedly acted to end a bureaucratic bungle which caused thousands of sanctioned jobseekers to wrongly incur rent arrears and face eviction.
SMIC was able to buy 12-inch equipment from private western firms, with a promise not to produce chips for Chinese military use.Taiwanese officials are now belatedly discussing an end to the ban on 12-inch fab investment.
The Liberal Democrats belatedly made an end to public sector pay restraint a "red line" for any negotiations on a renewed coalition, a move that may garner a few extra votes in their key marginals, but in most respects the cuts have been a dog that hasn't barked.
At the time, ESPN said that it had decided to end the collaboration because it belatedly realized that it did not have editorial control over anything "Frontline" televised or posted online, including an online promotion that angered the league and ESPN.
But theirs is an exercise in belatedly closing stable doors.
