Word: vainly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hubbard hires some musicians from Mobile to play his Opus 3, they are good but not too good at their jobs; the piano is the good but imperfect instrument you would expect to find in such a home; and Opus 3 is perfectly what might be expected of a vain, surprisingly talented but utterly derivative, provincial composer...
...Hollywood, the late Rudolph Valentino was guest of honor at a seance. Some 30 mediums chatted with him while reporters strained in vain to hear. At the guest of honor's request, the mediums said, they sang The Sheik of Araby...
...critics point to his age as his greatest liability as a presidential candidate. They feel that he is pompous, vain and unapproachable, that even though he is a good Senator he would make a poor President because of his lack of administrative training. They feel that his conversion from isolationism came long after most men of intelligence had already made the change, that he is virtually blank on domestic affairs...
...Super State. Through the Panama conference in 1826 Bolivar had tried in vain to build a league against the despotism of the Old World. Sixty-three years later U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine headed the first modern Pan American conference in Washington, in hopes of building a hemispheric trade system based on a newly industrialized U.S. For all the oratory, nothing much happened until World War II turned the system into a virtual Good Neighbors' alliance. It had been Bogotá's job to make the wartime relationship permanent...
...Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Debussy might have made any of his elders envious. Second-chair critics, who attend dozens of recitals a year and stoically put up with a lot of willing but perfunctory performers, found themselves using first-chair words of praise. "One searches his memory in vain," wrote the New York Times's Noel Straus, "for another so richly endowed with all of the factors that make for extraordinary and completely satisfying piano playing...