"She writes as a participant in her country's lamentable history, and she is a spinning fury, emitting words like sparks, enraged, saved from choking on the absurdities she has been called to witness only by the irresistible need to laugh at them".
Although the extraordinary quality of the poems made her death the more lamentable, that death gave her work certain immediate values it might not otherwise have had.
What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed.
Visiting Birdie in the aftermath of Earl's unexpected death and suddenly recalling his adolescent vision of her, Finus experiences "a lamentable sense of loss".
Olivia happily admitted that her own timekeeping was lamentable, but, once she joined Goldmsiths in 1979, it was justified by the stream of administrative meetings and teaching responsibilities that augmented an array of extra-curricular political and social commitments.
After all the grueling work and effort and her commendable qualifications, it would be lamentable if she were brought down by her undisciplined husband.
Seacole admitted to "lamentable blunders" in her remedies, different for each patient.
The old wounds and new divisions opened up by Brazil's impeachment vote were evident on Tuesday when Dilma Rousseff said it was "lamentable" that one of her accusers had glorified the torture used against her and others during the dictatorship era.
In her autobiography, Wharton said that her poems — "which I poured out with a lamentable facility" — were often written on sheets of brown paper that previously had been wrapped around deliveries to the Joneses' household, the provision of foolscap being inadequate to her demands.
