might-have-been

Maybe the glimpse (s) of suburban Manchester he got in the early 1950s were quite enough to feed his fantasies of that “provincial” might-have-been life.

Ballardian » “Enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries of pulp”: an interview with David Britton (the Savoy interviews, part 2a)

Given the ethical dilemmas, the future scenarios of many of the movies discussed here have been consigned to the realm of might-have-been sci-fi.

Could Never Let Me Go give human clones a good name?

Bear also does a great job of rewriting history here, with a dark version of 1938 that fits perfectly into might-have-been territory … Bear provides plenty of political intrigue, some tension and enough mythic conversation to make readers long for a mystical library collection of their own.

Subterranean Press » 2009 » May

This is a fascinating might-have-been, a six episode script for the first season of Doctor Who telling the story of a murder conspiracy against Alexander the Great, by Moris Farhi.

More on Catherine Ashton

Iceland is a sobering might-have-been for the Greeks.

The Euro's Tribulations

If so, a duo that could have created so much, and yet created so little, is just another might-have-been.

Blair's job was done by 1997: to numb Labour, and to enshrine Thatcherism

So to answer your question, yes—there are zero points in time wherein we could have changed a might-have-been to an is.

The Dragon’s Apprentice

In some cases, a might-have-been can even be viewed, as this one once was, by Masters Wells, Verne, and Sigurdsson.

The Dragon’s Apprentice

Would-be, wannabe, might-have-been, Moss is an incarnation of that combination of boulomaic modality and subjunctivity level so common in Crime and Realism, that of failure, of events that "should have happened, but did not".

Archive 2008-01-01

So on this anniversary day, allow me to recall Colbert's tentative entry into the 2008 race and what might-have-been.

Greg Mitchell: Obama Won Last Year Only Because Stephen Colbert Dropped Out!