But, in effect, this phase of the case belongs largely to defense lawyers, who often use a penalty portion of a capital trial to provide sympathetic details that a juror wanting to spare a defendant's life might grasp.
And in the same way news of his deteriorating health was once withheld to protect his image — Egyptians chided his self-regard as pharaoh-like — many people here assume the military-led government is doling out sympathetic details in order to manipulate public opinion.
Using CT scans of their bodies and analysis of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in their hair, archeologists have been able to reconstruct the final moments of their lives in tremendously sympathetic detail, complicating Spanish portrayals of the capacochas as meanly brutal sacrifices.
The conversation of adults IRL, I found, did not operate with such sympathetic detail; they don't have the time or the will.
A seemingly sympathetic interview detailed the young woman's fears and suspicions; then, the camera follows a private investigator, who in turn tracks and surveils the boyfriend or husband (or girlfriend or wife) who is under suspicion of committing infidelity.
He reveals his sympathetic view when Zeenat details her plight; he offers to help her with whatever knowledge he has.
But in most versions of this pitiless yarn, there is only one tender, redeeming detail: a sympathetic robin that scatters strawberry leaves as a coverlet over the children's tiny corpses: No burial these prettye babes Of any man receives Till Robin-redbreast painfully Did cover them with leaves.
"Golding deserves rediscovery, and if he gets it, then this biography – sympathetic without being idolatrous, detailed without becoming boring, learned, witty, insightful and humane: a model of its kind – will be in large measure responsible," Robert Harris declared in the Sunday Times, reviewing John Carey's William Golding.
Wells is detailed and sympathetic; he's also merciless, and, as one thing after another in the Walker household gets sold or traded, the cinematographer Roger Deakins turns the golden autumn light that shone at the beginning of the film into Boston's winter gray.
"This is the fabulous invalid's story, told in multitudinous detail by two sympathetic friends," The New York Times Book Review said.
Ms. Nottage, the wide-ranging and increasingly confident author of "Intimate Apparel" and "Fabulation or, the Re-Education of Undine," hooks her audience with promises of a conventionally structured, purposefully plotted play, stocked with sympathetic characters and informative topical detail.
