“... the rhythm steadies them as they climb near their limits: it gives them something to focus on, a means of earthing their rational fears and their neuroses. And in Mountain for July/August 1978 there is a photo of one American climber reading the Bhagavad-Ghita to another on a granite face in New Hampshire. Each one of us has a threshold beyond which we feel ...”

“... century, that anyone could have won the bid without recourse to questionable, not to say illegal, means. We know that since at least France 1998, bribes, presents and favours have been handed out by every successful World Cup host. The Sunday Times investigation into the bid concluded that Qatar is no different. As for alcohol, weak beer from one of Fifa’s ...”

“... feat. Golf has created its own brand of techno-narcissism: high-spec equipment understood not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, a mirror to the prowess of the individual user. One of the sport’s most credibility-threatening sideshows is an elite competition designed solely to test the capacity of special techniques and customised equipment to ...”

“... In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent post-apartheid South Africa, David Lurie, a Cape Town academic, reaches a similar conclusion when his daughter Lucy is gang-raped by three black men at her isolated homestead in the Eastern Cape. ‘But why did they hate me so?’ Lucy asks. ‘I had never set eyes on them.’ ‘It was ...”

“... no talking, coughing, clearing of the throat, or any movement whatsoever of the lips. As David Thomson remarks in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, this was a life ‘so primed for legend, it leaves one feeling that the doleful, suspicious Hughes had some hygienic plan for missing life altogether and going straight into myth’. Hughes was, after ...”

“... which is now universally referred to as rilievo schiacciato (squashed or mangled relief). By this means, aerial perspective was introduced into sculpture for the first time – and almost in advance of its reintroduction into painting. But we also find reliefs in both bronze and marble which are composed of figures crushed into the front plane. These might ...”

“... nation. This transition is one of the most remarkable events of the post-war years and, as David Gilmour says in what is by far the best general account of the phenomenon to have appeared so far, it was the King who made it possible. The greatest threat to Spanish democracy came, and still comes, from the Army. Franco had risen to power through the ...”

“... true. The major problem is that when Stern writes about the historic importance of individuals he means several quite different things at once. The least convincing claim concerns those individuals who ‘by themselves’ shaped world history. I doubt whether Stern really believes that the personal will of tyrants adequately explains the barbarities of our ...”

“... can apply to time as well as space, but it’s sad that Weight and Measure will stay – which means, being site-specific, exist – for so short a time. Ironically, it has the look of a great ...”

“... to the workers and to retain a faded empire. They were both welfarist and imperialist beyond the means of the economy they controlled, which they were incapable of modernising because they were ignorant of science, technology and industry. Barnett notes that, except for trade unionists, only one member of the Labour Cabinet of 1945 had had any experience of ...”

“... a full-time calling, the periodical press of the day, particularly local newspapers, offered a means for them to put their best efforts into print. In this way, a New York judge named Henry Livingston published his children’s verses beginning ‘’Twas the Night before Christmas’ in a local paper in the 1820s, only to have a more established poet ...”

“... oligarchy as much as it suits a rapacious one. As Mount points out, this sense of powerlessness means we live in a world very different from the one envisaged by some of the prophets of the new oligarchy. James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution (1941), envisaged a post-democratic order in which power was concentrated in the hands of an elite ...”

“... of the novel through digital storytelling (slim, thus far, would seem to be the upshot). By no means all the relevant reasons and contexts are Western. Andrew Plaks, for example, argues for the existence in China, from the early 16th to the late 19th century, of ‘works of extended prose fiction that, if not perfectly consonant with all of the aesthetic ...”

“... Catherine appeared before a local magistrate and formally accused Father Girard of using unholy means to seduce her. According to her deposition he had breathed into her mouth, after which she had developed unnatural passions. A lawyer with Jansenist sympathies then became involved in the case and published dozens of briefs, some of them hundreds of pages ...”

“... a bit remote, severe with himself but gentle to others, capable of laughter but ‘by no means a party animal’. The meta-message of Coetzee’s co-operation comes across as ‘nothing much to see here’, and that’s mostly the case with the biography too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and ...”