As with all his adaptations, he subverts the text to concentrate on the heroine Gwendolen, who he turns into a vapid but stroppy travesty of a modern woman, instead of allowing the original plot to speak for itself.

BBC: Doctor Zhivago and Daniel Deronda: Your views

You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.

FORBES: True or False: 'The Consumer Isn't A Moron; She Is Your Wife'

They disapprove of the vapid notion that spending more on a soft drink or ice cream can bring happiness or social cachet.

ECONOMIST: Brands

Grand language wrapped around a thin message produces only vapid blather.

CNN: Why inaugural speeches mostly fail

That little argument about unicorns and memory could leave you with the impression that a robot's inner monologue is pretty bizarre and vapid.

CNN: Robots aren't good at talking to themselves

Currin is considered a virtuosic painter but has rankled some critics who decry his pictures of vapid women as heartless kitsch.

FORBES: Tastemakers: Art

Some populist critics decried this ambition, and John Hammond, a well-to-do liberal impresario, denounced Ellington's concert works as vapid, accusing him of ignoring the troubles of his people.

ECONOMIST: Jazz biography

As for his writing, it passed from poems that had been an attempt to write some small and essentially truthful things out of the depths of himself (a self that was essentially unsure, tentative, indecisive) to often magisterial, and sometimes vapid prose: pronouncements upon the state of culture, and on how culture could stave off anarchy.

ECONOMIST: Victorian poetry