He had crushes on unattainable women and, if the woman he adored became attainable, he bolted. His greatest courtly love was for Charlotte Von Stein, a lady-in-waiting to the Duke’s mother ...

The weaker your ability to cope with the world, the stronger your desire for the unattainable. The severity of mental ill-health tends to be positively correlated with a tendency to fantasize.

"The primary lesson is that seeking complete isolation of a large, complex and globally-integrated economy is costly and unattainable," Elina Ribakova wrote in the Financial Times on Tuesday.