Recent years have seen the return of the sort of financial bubbles that many economists and regulators thought had gone forever.
At the opposite extreme, there was the colossal scale of the London docks -- mile upon mile of them, deep, broad and decaying -- that spoke for an imperial hegemony that had gone forever.
There was a lost generation in the saddle at the moment, but it seemed to him that the men coming on, the men of the war, were better; and all his old feeling that America was a bizarre accident, a sort of historical sport, had gone forever.
("Don't clap too hard - we're all in a very old building!") When Osborne wrote in the preface to The Entertainer in 1957 that, "The music hall is dying, and with it, a significant part of England", it was because he mourned that a part of England's heart had gone forever.
So he transferred the funds and, within barely 48 hours of his retirement, he saw how the money he had saved with a view to enjoying the last years of his life had gone forever.' The writer, who has three small children, enjoys the good fortune of having almost paid off his mortgage.
Anderson's singing voice has improved over the years, but speech still predominates - both her natural voice, sometimes processed with harmoniser or vocoder, and her "man's voice", which enables her to question the language of authority, and our attitudes towards things we thought "had gone forever: hanging, beheading, people in cages, torture".
Now all dreams have gone forever.
Countless things have gone forever.
Many of the former middle-class jobs have gone forever – relics of yesterday's economy.
Ludicrously complex securitised products, the CDO-squareds and -cubeds, have gone forever.
The era when 9m people would be listening to Simon Bates' 'Our Tune' at the same time has gone forever.
