The problem is that Mr. Myers, Mr. Welch and a squad of frantic screenwriters throw in disparate elements out of sheer laziness, concocting a grueling, chaotic stew of forced whimsy that utterly lacks imaginative integrity or visual spark.
Ms. Bartoli does much the same here as she did in recent years for Gluck and Vivaldi, shedding light on obscure corners of repertory in imaginative, utterly committed and often gripping performances.
Cecilia Bartoli, mezzo-soprano; Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Adam Fischer (Decca) Ms. Bartoli does here what she did for Gluck and Vivaldi, mining unsuspected veins of repertory in imaginative, utterly committed and often gripping performances.
"At a time when the public appetite for inventive furnishings was rather bland," said Michael Maharam, the co-owner of the textile company Maharam, who first sought out Harper a decade or so ago, "Irving, through his activities with George Nelson and Herman Miller, produced a variety of work in an utterly distinct and imaginative language, yielding some of the great designs of the century".
It wasn't a classic, but his attempt to frame British politics as a conflict between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, with Labour utterly irrelevant, was imaginative, and his attack on the Tories for abandoning their commitment to green policies was strong.
And, necessarily, these are not really plausible daydreams for Ulrich, since they reveal a grasp of contemporary life (cocaine-laced parties, hip-hop, the Russell Simmons-like music producer Plastic Munari) utterly beyond Ulrich's imaginative capabilities — unless he has been, all along, a very good novelist.
It may be difficult for puritan eyes, or those with a decided preference for straight lines and minimalist aesthetics to look at, and yet this utterly brilliant feat of imaginative construction has inspired designs by some of the world's finest engineers and architects over the past century, Oscar Niemeyer, Frei Otto and Pier Luigi Nervi among them.
Surely only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability?
Occasionally, Medawar slips in some Olympian glibness of his own: "science and imaginative writing are utterly incongruous, in English anyway … and the effect of combining them is merely absurd".
Belfast-born Alan Gillis, London-Irish Ian Duhig and Donegal's Matthew Sweeney spring from the same imaginative soil yet find utterly different forms.
