Here's one of the more audacious examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron invested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster to rent out movies online.
Going much further than, say, Edward Zwick's "Defiance," which derived its tale of tough Jews fighting back against the Nazis from the historical record, "Basterds" presented one of the most audacious examples of counterfactual history ever committed to film.
That would make Palm Juramiah one of the world's most audacious examples of diminishing real estate returns.
Looking at Hothouse now I can see foreshadows of Aldiss's later works; for example, it is an audacious exercise in world-building, like the Helliconia trilogy of the 1980s.
But take a step back and you notice another example of audacious international infiltration: how did this intense drama end up on Saturday night ITV?
While Johnson's judgments are often provocative and go against the grain — the rough treatment of Franklin Roosevelt is one of several hundred examples — this audacious book is a magnificent achievement.
In as much as longer-living humans use their accrued wealth to support and encourage the creation of projects as audacious and ambitious as — for example — the Coliseum, I believe the answer is yes.
One of the most notorious recent examples was the audacious daylight abduction of 12 young people from the unlicensed after-hours Heaven bar just blocks away from Mexico City's police headquarters in May 2013.
And, in the same way that Lisa has been celebrated as a feminist hero since her creation, by the cartoonist Matt Groening, in 1987, millions of women and girls, myself included, have long considered Scout Finch and Harriet M. Welsch two of the most important American examples of enlightened, audacious girlhood.
As well as the stuff that had quickly congealed into cliche ("Be realistic, demand the impossible"), there were endless examples at once audacious and seductive: "They are buying your happiness - steal it back"; "The alarm clock rings - first humiliation of the day"; "You will all finish up dying from comfort"; and, perhaps most presciently, "Forests came before men - the desert comes afterwards".
