In the shambolic early weeks of the Clinton administration he was a reassuring figure, older, tidier and palpably wiser than the cocky young baby-boomers then overrunning the White House.He had come up through the attorney-general's office under Lyndon Johnson, where his tenacity had recommended him: a dogged, uncomplaining appetite for tedious sorts of work.
Since Annie Colville's Lancashire childhood, she has been mercilessly pestered by ghosts insisting she deliver messages about "unfinished business of a particularly tedious sort".
It's painstaking, tedious work, a sort of aural equivalent of needlepoint.
The panda facepaint, the frogspawn contact lenses and the dull, rasping voice might be whimsically intended, but their effect is one of deep and tedious mirthlessness, the sort of pained pretension you see in teen goths stalking round Camden on a Saturday.
You begin to look out for the word "hate" as soon as you have read the word "love," like a sort of tedious game.
And even after polls have shown that strong majorities of both Americans and Cubans are eager to move on from a self-defeating embargo policy after five decades, critics like Sen. Ted Cruz have used the trip to launch the same sort of tedious attack we've heard for years: diplomatic engagement with Cuba is nothing short of a full endorsement of the Castros.
If you generally find this sort of thing tedious, fear not.
It's sort of a tedious job, which is why I often stem the entire bunch at once to get it done.
It was sort of a tedious thing to begin with and we were in this tiny apartment with our entire crew, no air conditioning.
After the sale, Love could be heard on the phone confessing that she'd gone over her limit, and then declaring that while she was "in trouble," she adored one of the Dash Snow collages on offer and thought Phillip Allen's 2004 "Tedious Plan (Chinne Version)" was "sort of cool," even though she didn't know who he was.
