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“... alone on an ice-field stretching to infinity. It is the moment of winter when the clouds meet the snow and abolish the world. I am skating with the languid ease which eludes me in life. My skates make no sound. Out of the whiteness all around me, someone else’s blades are approaching, a lethal lulling swish. A Canadian dream – God on skates. The dreams ...”

“... be no sea-ice at all in the summer. Recent satellite measurements analysed by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center are even more alarming. In March 2006 the area covered during the winter by sea-ice was at an all-time low: 120,000 square miles less than the previous year. At this rate, the Arctic could lose all of its sea-ice by 2030. Phytoplankton in ...”

“... wasn’t even surprising thirty years ago when made by a novelist who had no sense of humour. C.P. Snow’s Corridors of Power is a chore to read now, at least as far as the young are concerned. They don’t care very much that it struck a chord among a mandarin élite which was rapidly becoming disillusioned. Nevertheless, in the course of that novel ...”

“... they vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it – until I said she was married to C.P. Snow and then they vaguely remembered that too. They were much clearer about him: the two cultures argument, and Leavis’s vituperation, and some novels revolving around Cambridge colleges. Someone had read one of those novels long ago but couldn’t remember ...”

“... back in the seat than can be comfortable. The West includes grasslands, rocky crags, forests, snow-capped mountains – all shot, apparently, as American dreams should be, in Spain and Romania. The brothers encounter cultural innovations that surprise them and move them: a toothbrush, a water closet. We see western towns being built, patches of desert ...”

“... fill the air and finally some teachers arrive, stop the ruckus and throw Bonaparte out into the snow. He walks over to a cannon at the end of the porch, and rests on it. The bird is close by, in a tree, and as if it too knew its destiny, flies down to join him. The amazing thing here, though, is that during the fight the screen multiplies, splitting first ...”

“... flings himself into everyday pleasures he cannot escape time and its paradoxes. Here is ‘Snow’, his best-known poem from the 1930s: The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World ...”

“... It’s a bad year for snow in Zermatt. Mont Cervin is mostly bare red rock. Even the Matterhorn has only a frosting of snow. But the pistes are all right: every few hundred yards bright yellow snow-making machines, like small snub-nosed cannon, soak up water from the lakes and shoot it ten metres into the air to do what God can usually be relied on to achieve, and keep what skiers there are on the move ...”

“... challenge. Henry Hathaway’s 1969 film had rich, bright colours, National Park scenery with snow-capped mountains, long shots of little log cabins nestling in lonely valleys, a fulsome ‘western’ score by Elmer Bernstein, reminding us of dozens of movie trips to the unpopulated wilds, and even a sentimental folksy song delivered over the credits by ...”

“... the second. The weather is still terrible: torrential rain for much of the film, with some elegant snow now and then for scenic reasons. Los Angeles still looks like a crowded, run-down version of Tokyo. Coca-Cola is advertised, and Rick Deckard (played again by Harrison Ford) still drinks Johnny Walker Black Label, although it now comes in a fancy designer ...”

“... the German opposition and liberate a village. There is beer all round, much terrible music, and snow obligingly, romantically falls. Diana was able to lead the troop across the fields in spite of intense enemy fire because of her magically undamageable bracelets and her ability to see bullets arriving as if in slow motion. Diana quite plausibly thinks ...”

“... is so erratically hot and cold – hence the wonderful song ‘A Fine Romance’, sung in the snow. Finally, it turns out that the neglected fiancée loves someone else, and Astaire is off the hook. ‘Gee, that’s swell,’ he says, remembering only a moment later to feign regret. Earlier, he had said goodbye to Rogers in the number with pennies ...”

“... of rain or the crackling of a newly lit fire or the jokes of a street-hawker or the silence of snow in moonlight or the purring of a powerful car. This is a catalogue of the sensory pleasures that any Londoner might know (and note how carefully all five of the senses are brought into it). But it is also an act of self-definition, MacNeice claiming a role ...”

“... land of transplanted urban dream kingdoms, a paradise for poets who do not wish to be disturbed. Michael Viney’s documentary, The Corner of the Eye, opens with a slow sweep across this landscape, a picture of distances fringed with purple and a few tawny cows nosing through the foreground, then switches to a little white cottage in the midst of it all, and ...”

“... I imagine, formed our several ideas of what an argument is. But Locke – Locke plods. Aside from Michael Ayers, how many contributors to this issue of the Review, reviewers or reviewees, have read Locke’s Essay, word for word, from beginning to end? Fewer, perhaps, than would like to admit it. But Locke rules. No matter how briefly he is skimmed or how ...”