unavailing attempt

In the past, there were unavailing attempts to mine chalk.

"My unavailing attempts to somehow reintegrate the action quantum into classical theory extended over several years and caused me much trouble."

And the desperate, unavailing attempts to save the men on board the two hulls that had been sunk alongside the jetties.

Our bellies, however, felt differently about the matter, and would never agree that our unavailing attempts did more than add insult to injury.

He squinted his eyes in an unavailing attempt to penetrate the yellow-grey shroud that had come so close to being his last sight of the earth.

In 1441, he pursued the French army four times over the Seine and Oise rivers in an unavailing attempt to bring it to battle.

Khan Jahan, after some unavailing attempts to make head against this great force, retired to the south, and by rapid movements eluded the Moghal detachments.

And I didn't know, never dreamed--I, who had lived with John Barleycorn for so many years and laughed at all his unavailing attempts to win me.

Unavailing attempts today to reconcile these differences and define the extent of the Soviet commitment to Mr. Kohl reflected the murkiness of the current human rights situation in the Soviet Union.

We learn about his unavailing attempt to get elected to the French Academy, about the gradual foundering of his friendship with Cezanne (whom he had known since his schooldays), about his literary alliances and rivalries.

After numerous unavailing attempts at self-censorship (I had thought the problem was a proper name that was banned, a problem I've run into before) it appeared that the problem was simply the length of the word lute-harpsichord.

"I am the sentry who is never relieved", he said at the opening of new rooms at the Military Museum in Madrid on 7 March 1946, conveniently overlooking the fact that several unavailing attempts had been made to relieve him since 1939.

"After my dismission, I was more at a loss than ever for a subsistence, and, not to weary you with a repetition of the same unavailing attempts, unable to stand at the washing-tub, I began to consider the rich and poor as natural enemies, and became a thief from principle.

As a poet he was not well thought of by contemporaries, with Jonathan Swift refusing a dinner in an unavailing attempt to avoid revising one of Trapp's poems, and Abel Evans making an epigram on his blank verse translation of the Aeneid with a reminder of the commandment against murder.