It suggests that along with great virtues and talents, the person had some reassuringly human failings, which only made them more real and likeable.
When you introduce your client, you want to make him or her seem real and likeable.
He's so likeable in real life, really funny, quite light.
Perhaps it is this combination, of the all-too-human heroine (and, actually, hooray that this detective series features a likeable and physically real heroine rather than yet another middle-aged misanthropic male) with her work, which unflinchingly uncovers almost unfathomably dark aspects of human behaviour, that makes the Simran Singh books so compelling.
But, whether it's just because she has a cat (called Kitty Purry. You get it?) or because I'm not sure whether she's for real and actually the most likeable recording artist in ages - or someone's going to reveal her as a nefarious Disney plant, the swearing Miley Cyrus, I just don't know.
By the "dialectic", he means a constant movement between the two sides, between sympathiser and sympathisee, this movement occuring not with likeable characters, but the reverse: "Real sympathy", he says (meaning real novelistic sympathy), "is the benign sentence handed down to those who do not deserve it.
He's not always likeable – but neither are real people.
Dean, the narrator, is bookish and likeable, yet with no real traits of heroism or flaws to give him more depth – in short, a relatable but not especially memorable character (although his surprising actions at the end redeem him somewhat).
One of Hillary Clinton's greatest challenges is to get voters to see her as more real, more human and, yes, more likeable.
Yet real life takes over for the instantly likeable Lawn when the cameras and lights go off.
