Maybe that's why in the past several years the vicissitudes of marriage have been taken up more convincingly by memoirists and essayists, who eschew the realm of mutating statistics and tendentious conclusions for the open acceptance of bewilderment.
The Vatican press office responded to the books with severe, disapproving language: "Publications of this nature do not help in any way to establish clarity and truth but, rather, generate confusion and partial and tendentious conclusions.
On Monday, when it announced the arrests, the Holy See said in a statement: "Publications of this nature do not help in any way to establish clarity and truth, but rather generate confusion and partial and tendentious conclusions".
The report doesn't jump to tendentious conclusions unsupported by its collected evidence, it doesn't cover up or disregard key evidence, it doesn't try to fortify its case by ignoring recurring and extreme contradictions in the statements of those so far arrested.
Pundits who lay hold of movies often seem merely to filter them to yield predetermined results — as Frank Rich does, in Sunday's Times, in a piece in which he draws tendentious conclusions from a comparison of the stories and the box-office results of the Coen brothers' "True Grit" and David Fincher's "The Social Network".
His use of statistics has been challenged many times by those who think his conclusions are tendentious, but the next time he speaks on the issue that obsesses him, he will not be just Sir Andrew Green the ex-diplomat, he will be Lord Green, a life peer.
In the end, it's not enough to power this tendentious novel through to its unsurprising conclusion.
Almost one third of the studies were rated of "dubious" quality in which we did not draw definite conclusions due to incomplete reporting or tendentious data interpretation.
After careful consideration, my conclusion is...meh.Mr Jones's version of the story is tendentious.
