Instead of imagining Jake and Lady Brett and Count Mippipopolous, I kept hearing the movie star I probably first saw on the screen 30-odd years ago.
Instead of imagining a number of fictional campaigns the Women Institute could become involved in, Mangan would have done better delving into its fascinating history.
No doubt a citizenry schooled in renouncing desire instead of imagining there could be something more would be, in many respects, advantageous.
Instead of imagining a world without drastic inequality, anarcho-capitalists imagine a world where people and their property are secured by private defense agencies, which are paid to keep the peace.
Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.
Perhaps, then, instead of imagining what he would have written were he alive we would do better to go back to the books and see if what he wrote has anything to say to us now.
In "Yeah Yeah," he basically does the same "men are brutes" bit that Tim Allen does, except instead of imagining men as grunting apes, he imitates the monster from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (although the joke would work better if he imagined women as the monster's creator, not the author).
Instead of imagining how the scene before him will look on the big screen, Mr. Lumet, the director of "The Pawnbroker" and "Serpico," faces a bank of video monitors, judging how his latest sequence will play within the confines of a television set.
An alternative view of the Underground Railroad is also absorbing; instead of imagining attic compartments and Harriet Tubman leading hand-clasped groups through subway-like tunnels, the author shows a system operating via signs in the center of busy little cities, hidden in plain view for anyone knowledgeable enough to discern.
Instead of imagining what would be going on, I lost interest.
