And once again, a "doomed enterprise" violently divides the characters' lives into a before and after.

Hogarth's father, a schoolmaster, started a doomed enterprise, a coffee shop where people were encouraged to visit to brush up their Latin.

His first point was that historians themselves are prisoners of their own experience, committed "to a doomed enterprise - the quest for an unattainable objectivity."

So the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise - the quest for an unattainable objectivity.

It might be a doomed enterprise in the sense that a writer can't actually "be" another person, but it seems to me this is the non-negotiable basis of fiction.

Far be it from me to have predicted that Days Like These was a doomed enterprise, though you have to say the statistics were never in its favour.

It's a doomed enterprise, of course, a fool's errand, but how else, he asks, should one behave in a fallen world?

Yet holding this pass was a doomed enterprise, for even now the Makedones cavalry would be riding the high ridges to cut them off.

It was a doomed enterprise but a noble one: For a few years, Coppola did free himself and his protégés from Hollywood's thrall.

Each failure prompted questions about other doomed enterprises.