Reproved by the host of the inn for his tedious narrative of "The Tale of Sir Thopas," Chaucer in his own persona offers this prose allegory, a close translation of a French adaptation of a 13th-century Italian story.
But even Tories who could not care less about Mr Portillo's sexuality disapprove of the public display he has made of it.Although Mr Portillo has never embellished his original confession, he has woven this part of his biography into a tedious narrative of personal self-discovery.
Despite that, the tedious narrative persisted so much that Arsenal fans were celebrating Newcastle's win before their game at Stoke (pause for canned laughter).
It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents.
Contestible assertions of this kind enliven what is for long stretches a tedious, cliché-ridden narrative, in which international relations appear as a kind of abstract game, much as they used to be described many decades ago, when diplomatic history was fashionable.
While their destination, never fully revealed, is somehow as much for the body as for the mind, this narrative line gets tedious.
Criticizing the explanations presented by other historians is an integral part of historical scholarship sometimes carried to such tedious lengths that the actual narrative of events disappears under a tissue of scholastic sludge.
Everything about the game seems designed to annoy the impatient, including the tutorial, in which each sentence of instruction is followed by five seconds of silence, and the game narrative, which is tedious and incoherent.
Secretary to the king, his job was to edit Henry's plots: to erase his queen, cancel his inconvenient daughters and terminate those chapters in the narrative which were getting tedious.
Donald McKayle, credited with the original concept of the show, took the overworked and often tedious musical-revue format — there is no narrative — and injected it with enough panache and pace to keep things interesting.
Such musings are interspersed with tedious speculation on the interaction of memory and narrative.
