But Diamond has also been giddily vain enough to state: "I don't dream of being George Gershwin, I dream of being Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Robert Frost.
He then developed a set of introspective techniques designed to make the suffering individual more self-aware, and through this self-awareness to move systematically beyond the self and its vain strivings toward a state he called nirvana.
The latest screw-tightening immigration bill going through parliament removes support from thousands more, in a vain pretence that the state has a grip on the war-driven refugee crisis.
She sits next to the great and quietly skewers them: R.A. Butler, Eden's po-faced chancellor of the exchequer, self-important and "curiously unnatural", his wife "a school prefect, bullying the new girl"; Harold Macmillan, gracious and untrustworthy; John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, "slow, vain and jealous .Eden confided in her.
And its hard not to have at least a little sympathy for a government, no matter how repressive, that tried in vain to promote a state sponsored dance with the slogan "Do the Lipsi!" Part of Jampol's PhD thesis involved deciphering the kind of underground subcultures that no outsider would be able to spot without a playbook.
Reuven Rivlin won 63 votes to his rival's 53.Mr Rivlin (pictured above) replaces the 90-year-old Shimon Peres, who for the past two decades has grappled in vain for a two-state settlement.
And yet, as the clock counted down, Madeleine Albright, America's secretary of state, sought in vain to get the state's governor, Jim Gilmore, to exercise clemency.Her intervention had to do with politics, not morality.
The AU force has proved ineffective but a bigger or more robust intervention, by America or any other country, is not expected; this week Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, called in vain for UN peacekeepers to be sent.
One would also search in vain for another early modern state that steadily devoted 30percentt of its defense expenditure to the navy, as England did in the later 16th century.
But what about the several dozen intellectuals, religious scholars and journalists who, with far less international attention, have been awaiting trial in Saudi Arabia since last September, some of them in solitary confinement while the state tries in vain to find grounds to charge them?
