When like Mr Putin they disappear, the fantasises that fill the vacuum say as much about public opinion and political reality as their speeches.
And which of us there can say we did not secretly fantasise that Mitchell would suddenly lose it and at least blurt out to the committee, in recognition of its support for Britain's aid programme but in vexation at its persistent questioning, what he has admitted he told the police that evening: "I thought you guys were supposed to f***ing help us"?
He wrote it all up in this travel book; the miners and sharpers and gunslingers he met and drank with, and the greed and fantasising that drove everyone on the frontier, himself included.
There was also that all-pervasive sense of eroticism that goes with the boredom of war, that freewheeling fantasising that goes with displaced persons who are displaced through no fault of their own.
I fantasised that I'd be very wealthy if I collected the right ones.
In showing Clay's graduation from a passively colluding observer to active perpetrator now, a man who either indulges in torture or fantasises about it, Ellis suggests that evil begins with torpor - induced by ambien and valium – or by emotional disengagement.
And it applies not only to the US but to every industrialised country whose government fantasises that new high-tech businesses are the key to industrial renewal.
She's a successful editor at Random House, and Frances fantasises that Sophie will eventually publish the book that confirms Frances's artistic success.
Philip Roth, at age 40, published the essay "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting' or, Looking at Kafka", which appropriates its title from the short story "A Hunger Artist", and fantasises that the genius of Prague didn't die at age 40, but instead was cured of tuberculosis, and lived on to witness the Nazi regime.
"Everybody kind of fantasises about it – flying – and it's an amazing place in history right now that man actually has the ability to pull it off".
