On the minus side: "She's not a huge name," as Mr. Irons put it, hastening to add that he had "asked around a lot" about her and found "from every quarter, great admiration".
"Every shred of admiration I had for you is gone," McCaul told Nassar, the doctor she said she'd once respected and called a friend.
Not every critic had unqualified admiration for Porter, though.
As pilgrim, Chaucer professes admiration for every scoundrel he gathers together in his company of 28 wayfarers en route to Canterbury.
Where others had to ransack their memories, Humboldt – "whose eyes are natural telescopes & microscopes", as the American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said in admiration – had every morsel of knowledge and observation to hand at an instant.
That is, I suppose, a reflection of my general distaste for the whole cult of celebrity - not just the adoration of people with no merits except the ability to be photographed for newspapers but, equally, the assumption that a person of distinction is in every particular worth both admiration and imitation.
His description of the origins of the Vietnamese Communist party, for example, is wrong in almost every particular; his warm admiration for John Paul Vann, the mythomaniac American counter-insurgency officer whose career was detailed in Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer-prize winning Bright and Shining Lie (1988), is particularly perverse.
On the morning she died in a Galveston, Tex., hospital, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began his news conference in Washington with this salute: "She was a woman who, in her athletic career, certainly won the admiration of every person in the United States, all sports people all over the world, and in her gallant fight against cancer, she put up one of the kind of fights that inspire us all".
There were an abundance of words of admiration, yet every, "You're pretty today," and, "You look summery in that dress," became nasty, digging reminders that I was not, indeed, beautiful.
Muir, spending his first summer working as a shepherd among the pines of the Sierra Nevada in California, reflected in his journal that "Every tree calls for special admiration.
