“... script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Robert Redford. Solo Faces is the story of a rock-climbing drifter and his friend and rival and their pursuit of glory through heroic feats on the mountain. In the earlier A Sport and a Pastime, the quarry, the struggled for peak, is perfect sexual love, though ...”

“... Roundhouse, the former engine-turning shed. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the ...”

“... that the octopus is, phenomenologically speaking, in a hybrid situation: its arms are partly self, and partly other. Because of this, the octopus is sometimes held up as a mascot for the ‘embodied cognition’ movement in psychology, according to which the physical body, by constraining and making possible certain actions, is itself ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... account of his brush with death, I feel shaken again: as if my fairly innocent adolescent self is sitting on some huge prehistoric monster stranded on the rocks with a pale blue sky behind it. But that’s not quite right; the wrecked ship isn’t just something used and past: it’s like looking at the disasters, mistakes and accidents that are all ...”

“... and on the royal favourite Buckingham. There is only one article on a country other than England: Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered ...”

“... wrote of the encounter. ‘The pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love, and I became very humble within myself … from him was radiating a feeling of infinite understanding and kindness, with supreme humility.’Huge if true. By way of ...”

“... depends on its objectives. According to Miller, Afghanistan was ‘a clear-cut just war of self-defence’ which ‘just happened to require liberating an oppressed people’. In common with most accounts of the war, his neglects to mention that in September 2001 Afghanistan was in a state of incipient famine. In 1999 and 2000, the country had suffered ...”

“... like at the end of his days.’ Charlie was probably shadowed a little by Beef, his gamely young self: he was no stranger to the world he lived in. But family life seemed to have him in its grip; it reformed him; it placed him in a new relation to his surroundings – he was a father, and a husband who loved his wife – and the old temptations must have ...”

“... very different line, and in their chapter on the general law of medical negligence John Finch and Robert Cowley (respectively an academic and a practising lawyer) commend them for doing so. The Canadian Supreme Court has pointed out that what is a reasonable risk to a doctor is not always so to the patient, and that to allow medical judgment alone to ...”

“... against Schoenbaum’s apparent relativism is accompanied by a sense that if his more visibly self-conscious precursor erred, it was actually on the side of sentiment. On the few occasions when Honan finds reason to correct Schoenbaum (which he does with a quiet but clear satisfaction), it is always to extirpate some residual romantic indulgence. The ...”

“... necessary for her to come into France . . . to raise the siege of Orléans . . . and to go to Robert de Beaudricourt in the town of Vaucouleurs, the captain of that place, that he would give her people to go with her.’ DeVries assigns priority to Joan’s experience of the ‘voice’, and suggests that ‘Burgundian troops’ burned the church at ...”

“... the Daleks were made the subject of two big storylines in the relaunched Doctor Who. In the first, Robert Shearman’s ‘Dalek’, the last living representative of the race is tortured by American operatives in orange boilersuits at an underground facility; he falls in love with Rose, the new Doctor’s main assistant, and comes to understand his ...”

“... house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’ – but of course it was much larger, and the company tended to be noisy and numerous, whereas in Sheffield he depended on his middle-class academic colleagues for talk and drinking company and even for ...”

“... nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry.Twitter has been disastrous in this regard, hurling the authors of critical academic discourses into the same arena as op-ed writers, politicians and members of the general public, without any mediators or translators ...”