I wonder what quackery the Kuwaiti authorities plan to invent in their vain attempt to identify gay men.
The excitement that interviewers seek in vain when speaking to Henman is provided on the court, where the British number one plays a brand of attacking, serve-and-volley tennis that is rapidly being replaced by the baseline belting preferred by most of the new generation of players.
Maurizio calls, in vain, to prevent the ensuing yellow-suited stampede.
But Persuasion I didn't re-read, remembering all my negative feelings about the three sisters and their vain, silly father.
I am not suggesting a repeat of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, a vain attempt to counter Hollywood influence by establishing British film quotas, which resulted in the production of numerous "quota quickies", low-budget films with little regard for quality that reached very few people.
Shane and Liz are to romance what Valentine's Day is to love: shallow, vain, insincere and about as subtle as a platter of lamb chops in a butcher's window, or its sartorial equivalent, one of Hurley's frocks.
But any attempts to control the media's attention to this particular incident were in vain: the pictures were picked up by news agencies worldwide and a cut-out image of Mugabe's tumble was soon turned into memes and shared on social media using the hashtag #MugabeFalls.
I accede, puffing through your ground floor in the inevitably vain hope of a small tip to supplement my meagre, below-London-living-wage salary.
Morsi's co-defendants added to the chorus with chants of "down with military rule", a slogan the Muslim Brotherhood declined to use before Morsi's overthrow in a vain attempt to win over the army.
And everyone is waiting in vain for the institutions that are supposed to have our best interests at heart to come up with some solution…") Some of the lyrics on his last two albums suggest a kind of transcendent Wordsworthian relationship with the natural world.
My favourite American comic strip was Terry and the Pirates, a wonderful Oriental farrago of Chinese warlords, dragon ladies and antique pagodas that had the added excitement for me of being set in the China where I lived, an impossibly exotic realm for which I searched in vain among Shanghai's Manhattan-style department stores and nightclubs.
