Oh, it was such a pathetic tale, Diana.

The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit.

In Magunira Shagada, director Prafulla Mohanty looked pained to explore a pathetic tale of a bullock-cart driver and its clan confronted by the challenge of 'machine'-age.

Tamaak might be lying yet, but this pathetic tale of attempted genocide had the ring of truth and anger to it.

On the same program is Lodewijk Crijns's "Red Rag," the pathetic yet bizarrely comic tale of true eccentrics.

But the Allens (mother and daughter) have been right to sense that the tale, weird and pathetic as it is, is also touched with surrealistic comedy.

There is that pathetic tale of the man who labored like a slave, unresting, unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a fortune, and was happy over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week a pestilence swept away all whom he held dear and left him desolate.

That she would wear Keller's sweater to drive away her loneliness told a pretty pathetic tale.

Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post thought it degrading for candidates to be "reduced to the level customarily occupied by authors hustling their books, faded movie stars grasping for one last jolt of celebrity and transvestites telling their pathetic tales."

The court sat in uncomfortable near-silence and listened to their pathetic tales of poverty, illness, desperation, journeys out on to the streets to pick up a few pence by selling their bodies, and the cheating, then the violence which had followed.